Chris Hegarty
Senior Principal Engineer At Elastic
Dublin, Dublin 1, Ireland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Hegarty is a Senior Principal Engineer at Elastic with 18 years of experience specializing in search relevance, RAG and vector search for Elasticsearch and Lucene. As Chair of the Apache Lucene PMC and an OpenJDK committer/reviewer, he brings deep expertise in low-level Java systems, query parsing, index management and HTTP client multithreading fixes visible in high-profile projects like OpenJDK and Elasticsearch. His career spans Sun/Oracle Java platform work and long-term contributions to core open-source search and JVM infrastructure, blending rigorous test automation with production-facing backend engineering. Based in Dublin, he is known for making cross-cutting, low-level changes that improve reliability and performance across large, distributed codebases—work that often touches both Lucene internals and the JVM itself.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Applications, BSc Computer Applications at Dublin City University
Github Skills (19)
lucene10
search-engine10
testing10
information-retrieval10
java10
javas10
query-parser10
http-client10
parse10
multithreading9
indexing9
concurrent-programming8
concurrency8
websocket8
concurrent8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Sep 2021 - Apr 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 275 reviews, 133 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Chris made contributions focused on enhancing the query parsing and index management functionalities of Apache Lucene. Their work involved extending the query parser to support fuzzy parsing extensions, allowing for customization of similarity distance calculations, and adding a new method to the SegmentInfo class. The user also improved the messages in CMS infostream messages, and corrected tests that relied on document order. Further work included implementing several test cases related to faceting functionality.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
openjdk/jdk
May 2020 - Jul 2024
JDK main-line development https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:309 reviews, 18 PRs, 280 comments in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris made several contributions to the openjdk/jdk repository. They fixed a websocket connection timeout issue. The user also made changes related to multithreading to improve the interoperability between HTTP client and flow subscriber/publisher and to avoid memory issues. Additionally, the user addressed issues in the HTTP client implementation.
openjdkjavajvmjdk
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