Colin Douch
Site Reliability Engineer at DuckDuckGo
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Douch is a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer with 12 years’ experience building and operating high-throughput observability and telemetry systems, most recently at DuckDuckGo and previously leading observability at Cloudflare where he helped scale pipelines to tens of millions of events per second. He combines deep systems and backend skills—Python, C++, Puppet, AWS—with practical algorithmic thinking from an engineering honours background in network engineering. Colin has a track record of driving platform reliability and developer experience: redesigning telemetry pipelines, running 24/7 on-call rotations, and acting as an internal product owner for platform features. He is also an active open-source contributor to prominent projects like OpenTelemetry Collector, Prometheus Alertmanager, and syslog-ng, adding pragmatic features such as named-pipe receivers, syslog rate-limiting, and silence-query improvements. Based in London, he blends hands-on engineering with cross-team coaching and customer-style engagement to prioritize platform work. A less obvious strength is his background in reinforcement learning research, which he has applied to automation and tooling design.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Network Engineering, Bachelor’s Degree Network Engineering at Victoria University of Wellington
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (32)
kubernetes10
rate-limiting10
apidoc10
multithreading10
testing10
c1110
java10
c1710
go10
api10
filter10
kubernetes-pods10
opentelemetry10
alarmmanager10
logging10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
prometheus/alertmanager
Dec 2017 - Jul 2022
Prometheus Alertmanager
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 5 commits, 11 PRs in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily contributed to the Alertmanager's core functionality and tooling, implementing features related to silence management and API improvements. They added the ability to query for expiring silences and fixed issues related to updating silence comments. Additionally, the user made changes to the alertmanager to handle the `isEqual` flag for matchers and refactored the API client code. The user also added the receiver name as a label to notification metrics and added an ID flag to amtool silence query command.
opsgenieprometheus-exporterpagerdutyemaildeduplication
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib
Sep 2023 - Jul 2024
Contrib repository for the OpenTelemetry Collector
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 11 PRs, 31 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Colin primarily focused on implementing and integrating features for the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib project. They developed a named pipe input operator to read data from named pipes, including associated testing and integration with the existing pipeline. The user also contributed to the receiver by creating a namedpipe receiver, enabling the collector to read logs from the named pipe. Furthermore, the user added support for octet counting in the syslog exporter and implemented various OTTL (OpenTelemetry Transformation Language) converters such as `Year`, `Month`, `Day`, `Minute`, and `Sprintf`.
contribopentelemetry-collectortracingtempoobservability
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