Chris Berkhout
Senior Software Engineer at Elastic
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Berkhout is a senior software engineer based in Berlin with 15 years of experience building and operating backend systems at scale, currently contributing to Elastic after a long tenure at SoundCloud. He has deep experience across infrastructure and backend stacks—Scala, Ruby, Go, Spark, Kubernetes, Kafka and more—and has shipped services serving tens of millions of monthly active users. Chris is an active open-source contributor to notable projects such as Elastic Beats, where his work on Filebeat’s httpjson input and robust rate-limiting/retry logic improved reliability under 429 responses. Comfortable spanning full stack and ops, he pairs pragmatic engineering with systems thinking and a history of automating deployments and testing practices. Multilingual and internationally experienced, he brings a mix of production-grade reliability, cross-language fluency and a knack for fixing tricky edge-case bugs in distributed systems.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
The University of MelbourneSKB Language and Cultural Exchange, SKB Language and Cultural Exchange at Technische Universität BerlinTechnical University BerlinMinsk State Linguistic University
English, German
Stackoverflow
93reputation
1kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
http10
rate-limiting10
go10
filebeat10
amazon-elasticsearch9
elasticsearch-api9
testing9
aws-elasticsearch9
elasticsearchquery9
tput9
elasticsearch9
vim6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/beats
May 2023 - Mar 2025
:tropical_fish: Beats - Lightweight shippers for Elasticsearch & Logstash
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:77 reviews, 45 PRs, 45 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the `filebeat` component of the repository, focusing on the `httpjson` input and rate limiting mechanisms. Their work involved fixing bugs related to basic authentication and nil pointer dereferences in chained HTTP requests. They implemented rate limiting across multiple HTTP responses and handled related retry logic for 429 errors, also modifying the code to prevent negative request rates around rate limit resets. These changes enhance the reliability and performance of the data shipping functionality.
tropicalheartbeatlogstashbeatsfilebeat
chrisberkhout/fin-scripts
Jul 2015 - Mar 2021
Scripts for managing my finances
Contributions:6 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 9 months
finances
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