Damien Mathieu
Principal Software Engineer at Elastic
Toulouse, Occitania, France
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDamien Mathieu is a Principal Software Engineer based in Toulouse with 16 years of experience building and operating observability and backend systems across platforms like Heroku, Okta/Auth0, and Elastic. He blends hands-on engineering with platform leadership—running production monitoring, leading migrations to tracing, and coaching teams on observability best practices. A prolific open-source contributor, Damien has made significant backend contributions to the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (collector, SDKs and exporters) and integrated tracing into high-profile projects like the Kubernetes ingress-nginx controller. His work spans backend, DevOps and frontend, from refining logging libraries to improving CI and web UI experiences, showing a pragmatic full-stack mindset. Known for methodical refactoring and attention to data integrity (e.g., fixing integer overflows and improving export pipelines), he brings reliability-first thinking to distributed systems.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Technician certificate Computer science, Technician certificate Computer science at Lycée Saint Paul Bourdon BlancLicense Software Engineering, License Software Engineering at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens)
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Github Skills (73)
testing10
exporter10
ruby10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
ember10
build-automation10
heroku10
opentelemetry10
activerecord10
elasticsearch10
refactoring10
trace10
ruby-on-rails10
elasticsearch-api10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib
May 2022 - Jan 2023
Collection of extensions for OpenTelemetry-Go.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:1052 reviews, 9 commits, 490 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Damien primarily contributed to improving the testing and functionality of the OpenTelemetry-Go Contrib project. The contributions include adding tests for options in the otelsarama instrumentation, removing unused elements in grpc interceptor tests, and setting up the PublicEndpointFn option for the HTTP instrumentation. Additionally, the user refactored tests in the HTTP handler to reduce repetition and ensure a default status code is set. These changes suggest a focus on improving the quality and robustness of OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
golangtracingobservabilityotelextensions
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go
Oct 2019 - Oct 2022
OpenTelemetry Go API and SDK
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1165 reviews, 20 commits, 375 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Damien primarily focused on refactoring and expanding the `sdk/trace` package within the OpenTelemetry Go repository. Their contributions included migrating the `sdk/exporter` package, renaming structs, and modifying test files. Furthermore, the user updated the `batch_span_processor` code to enhance the export functionality. These changes involved improving the overall structure and functionality of trace exporting and processing.
golangapitracingsdkobservability
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