Burak Yavuz
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Databricks
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBurak Yavuz is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building large-scale data and streaming systems at Databricks, where he helped create Delta Lake and contributed core features to Apache Spark such as Structured Streaming APIs. He combines strong backend and data-engineering chops (Java, Scala, Python, Spark, Kafka, AWS/Azure) with rigorous experimental problem-solving to produce clear, maintainable solutions. A longtime Apache Spark committer, Burak has driven performance benchmarking for MLlib and practical build/CI improvements for projects like delta-io/delta, improving developer workflows and resource usage. He’s equally comfortable in code, infrastructure, and people roles—having led a data ingestion team and served short rotations as a solutions architect for high-profile customers. His academic work at Stanford on Sampled Stochastic Subgradient reflects a sustained interest in marrying randomized linear algebra and SGD for efficient optimization. Peers know him as the reliable “go-to” engineer who simplifies complex systems and stabilizes builds and streaming pipelines.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mechanical Engineering at Boğaziçi UniversityThe Koc SchoolMaster's Degree Management Science and Engineering, Master's Degree Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University
English, Turkish, German, Spanish
Github Skills (29)
apache-spark10
spark10
recommendation-system10
classification10
spark-structured-streaming10
data-engineering10
dataframes10
machine-learning10
sbt10
cicd10
dataframe10
ml10
scala10
performance-testing10
stream10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
delta-io/delta
Apr 2019 - Dec 2022
An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:24 reviews, 96 commits, 26 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Burak primarily contributed to the build and infrastructure aspects of the delta-io/delta repository. They focused on setting up and configuring CI/CD pipelines, adding CircleCI support, and reducing memory usage in the build process by modifying build configurations. Furthermore, they updated build files, and memory configurations to facilitate test execution and streamlined resource utilization. Their work improved the development workflow and ensured the project's maintainability.
analyticsprestodbflinkbig-dataspark
apache/spark
Jun 2015 - Aug 2020
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Data Engineer
Back-end Developer / Data EngineerContributions:115 reviews, 8 commits, 179 PRs in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Burak contributed significantly to the Apache Spark project, focusing on enhancements and bug fixes. They implemented new APIs for Structured Streaming, notably the addition of `withWatermark` and `checkpoint` to `DataFrame`, and support for TableProvider. Additionally, they addressed several issues, including fixes for the `from_json` function, improvements to the implementation of `crosstab`, and optimizations of the `FileStreamSource` batch generation. Their work involved modifying and improving the core framework for data processing and streaming capabilities.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
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