Daniel Schierbeck
Senior Principal Engineer at Zendesk
Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Schierbeck is a Senior Principal Engineer based in Copenhagen with 19 years of experience designing and building scalable, reliable distributed systems. At Zendesk he has progressed from software engineer to senior principal, blending hands-on backend development with technical leadership, roadmap definition, and cross-functional collaboration with product and business stakeholders. He is an active open-source contributor in the Ruby ecosystem, with notable contributions to projects like Datadog’s dd-trace-rb, ruby-kafka, and Zendesk’s own Samson deployment tool, improving tracing, Kafka metadata support, and deployment performance. Daniel’s work often focuses on pragmatic reliability and observability improvements—adding instrumentation, optimizing queries and indices, and strengthening test coverage—to make systems easier to operate at scale. He pairs deep Rails and backend expertise with a history of shipping production-ready features and infrastructure that bridge tactical needs and long-term strategy.
19 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen
Danish, English, spanish (un poco)
Stackoverflow
1,952reputation
1.3mreached
16answers
18questions
Github Skills (45)
form-builder10
ruby-rails10
tracer10
dsl10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
payment-integration10
payment-gateway10
rails10
decode10
network-programming10
decoding10
ruby10
database-design10
db-schema10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
zendesk/ruby-kafka
Jan 2016 - Dec 2022
A Ruby client library for Apache Kafka
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 releases, 34 reviews, 1348 commits in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Daniel's contributions primarily focused on implementing core functionalities for the Kafka client. They added support for metadata requests, incorporating several new classes for handling broker, topic, and partition metadata, and modified existing classes for message encoding and decoding to support the new features. They also introduced a new class for managing the connection and implemented basic produce requests with the underlying network code. Furthermore, they were responsible for establishing an initial topic and enabling the automated creation of topics when fetching messages.
apache-kafkaruby-gemkafka-consumerclient-libraryruby-client
zendesk/samson
Jan 2014 - Oct 2018
Web interface for deployments, with plugin architecture and kubernetes support
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:467 commits, 39 PRs, 73 pushes in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on enhancing the `samson` deployment web interface by adding new features and improving existing ones. Their contributions included improving performance through database indexing and query optimization, as well as UI enhancements to show current deploys on release overview pages. They also worked on adding new features related to deploying stages and made updates to stage and release models.
continuous-deploymentplugin-architectureweb-interfacedeploymentdocker
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