Chris Golden
Principal Software Engineer at Roblox
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Golden is a Principal Software Engineer based in Mountain View with over 15 years of experience building scalable storage, observability, and data systems across startups and large enterprises. He has driven foundational features and developer productivity at Pure Storage, contributed to real-time SQL-based data transformation and testing tooling in the Materialize open-source project, and led platform and security engineering efforts at Lacework and Roblox. Chris specializes in backend systems, benchmarking and test infrastructure, container tooling, and observability—often focusing on the hard engineering work that makes large distributed systems dependable. He pairs hands-on coding with technical leadership, having led multiple teams, shaped engineering ladders, and mentored engineers through escalations and customer-facing issues. Notably, his open-source contributions include improving Docker Compose tooling and Kafka/Avro benchmarking workflows in a widely used real-time data project. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering/Computer Science from USC and combines deep systems design experience with a pragmatic focus on operational excellence.
6 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Computer Engineering Computer Science, Bachelors Computer Engineering Computer Science at University of Southern California
English
Github Skills (28)
benchmark10
docker10
performance-monitor10
data-engineering10
debezium10
kafka10
benchmarking10
distributed-systems10
docker-compose10
dockers10
cicd10
performance-measurement10
performance-testing10
performance-analysis10
performance-tuning10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
MaterializeInc/materialize
Aug 2020 - May 2021
Real-time Data Integration and Transformation: use SQL to transform, deliver, and act on fast-changing data.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 360 reviews, 130 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Chris contributed to the Materialize project by working on features related to Docker Compose, benchmarking, and the system's test infrastructure. They modified the `mzcompose` tool to enforce minimum Docker Compose versions and added web and port listing commands. They implemented and improved benchmarking workflows for Kafka data ingestion and Avro upsert performance, integrating tools such as `chbench` and `kgen`. Additionally, they made changes to the code base related to Debezium.
streamsdata-warehousedistributed-sql-databasestreamingpostgresql-dialect
cirego/materialize
Mar 2021 - Jun 2021
Materialize simplifies application development with streaming data. Incrementally-updated materialized views - in PostgreSQL and in real time. Materialize is powered by Timely Dataflow.
Contributions:2 PRs, 217 pushes, 104 branches in 3 months
materialized-viewstimelystreaming-datastreamingdocker
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