Chris Duncan
Staff Software Engineer at Zscaler
Broomfield, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Duncan is a Staff/Principal software engineer with 15 years building scalable, cost-efficient backend systems and data pipelines, now designing greenfield services at Zscaler from backend through infrastructure. He specializes in pragmatic, concurrent Golang architectures and cloud-native DevOps, and has a track record of dramatic cost and performance wins—e.g., reducing ingestion stack footprint by 50x and cutting Elasticsearch/RDS spend by hundreds of thousands annually. Chris has led large migrations off legacy monoliths to gRPC/Protobuf microservices, designed high-throughput event processors (hundreds of millions of events/day), and authored robust Go contributions to well-known projects like the Elasticsearch and ClickHouse Go clients. He pairs hands-on implementation with mentoring and architectural standards, owning designs from RFCs and ERDs through deployments and support. Currently learning Rust, he balances deep technical rigor with an ability to simplify complex systems—and outside work he plays nearly any racket sport, which reflects his competitive, iterative mindset.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State UniversityBachelor of Science (BS) Computer and Information Sciences Computer Information Systems, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer and Information Sciences Computer Information Systems at Metropolitan State University of Denver
English
Github Skills (24)
amazon-elasticsearch10
databases10
elasticsearchquery10
go10
aws10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
clickhouse10
database10
elasticsearch-api10
testing9
datatypes9
decimals9
context-manager9
enums9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
ClickHouse/clickhouse-go
Jun 2020 - Apr 2021
Golang driver for ClickHouse
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 11 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on enhancing the ClickHouse Go driver, demonstrating expertise in database interaction and backend development. Their contributions centered on improving the driver's functionality, especially related to data type handling, by adding comprehensive tests for various data types, including Enum and Decimal, and addressing potential overflow issues. These changes included modifications to core data handling functions and the implementation of specific test cases to ensure the driver's robustness and accuracy.
golangsqlclickhouseanalytics-databasedatabase
olivere/elastic
Jul 2018 - May 2020
Deprecated: Use the official Elasticsearch client for Go at https://github.com/elastic/go-elasticsearch
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 5 PRs, 14 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the Go client library for Elasticsearch. Their work included adapting the retry mechanism, integrating AWS V4 signing support, and addressing context error handling. They also made modifications to the AWS v4 signer, including handling for `io.ReadSeeker` and removing unnecessary HTTPS forcing. This demonstrates a focus on enhancing the library's functionality, error handling, and integration with external services.
golangelasticgoelasticsearchelasticsearch-client
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