Brian Simpson
Software Engineer at Datadog
Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Simpson is a seasoned software engineer with 15 years of experience building scalable backend systems at companies including Reddit, Google, and Datadog. He spent a decade at Reddit as a Staff Engineer, contributing to core infrastructure like the widely used baseplate.py framework—adding tracing, memcache serialization, Kafka consumption, and Cassandra integrations. At Google and now Datadog he has continued to focus on observability and reliable distributed services, bringing production-hardened practices to complex systems. Based in Newton, Massachusetts and educated at MIT, he blends deep systems knowledge with pragmatic engineering. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful context management and tracing work that bridges libraries and services. He’s the kind of engineer who improves developer ergonomics while driving measurable reliability gains in large-scale environments.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (12)
application-framework10
app-framework10
web-framework10
trace10
tracer10
python10
memcached9
serialization9
cassandra9
kafka9
data-serialization9
testing8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
reddit/baseplate.py
Feb 2017 - Feb 2021
reddit's python service framework
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 19 commits, 29 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Brian contributed to the `reddit/baseplate.py` framework by implementing and modifying tracing and memcache serialization/deserialization features. They added functionality for Kafka queue consumption, context management, and Cassandra integration, which improved the framework's capabilities. The changes included updates to core components and testing.
servicespythonasynciogeventframework
bsimpson63/baseplate
Apr 2017 - Nov 2019
reddit's python service framework
Contributions:97 pushes, 15 branches in 2 years 7 months
pythonasynciogeventpython3service-framework
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