David Knapp
Senior Software Engineer at Cisco Meraki
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Knapp is a Senior Software Engineer based in San Francisco with 14 years of experience building resilient back-end systems and developer tooling. Trained in Electrical and Computer Engineering, he blends hardware-aware thinking with deep software and systems expertise, particularly on Linux/Unix platforms. At SigFig he led integrations with major US banks and helped scale assets under management from millions to over a billion by designing robust backend infrastructure and distributed tracing. He currently contributes to Cisco Meraki and has notable open-source contributions to high-profile JVM projects like Akka and Kamon, adding features, optimizations, and production-grade integrations such as Datadog support. Comfortable across embedded Linux to large distributed services, he brings a pragmatic focus on reliability, observability, and efficient async stream processing. Colleagues value his ability to standardize complex multi-team workflows and turn nuanced systems problems into maintainable, testable solutions.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Arizona
Github Skills (13)
distributed-tracing10
metric10
reactive-streams10
javas10
kamon10
akka10
java10
concurrency10
streaming10
scala10
testing9
distributed-systems9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
kamon-io/Kamon
Jan 2018 - Jul 2019
Distributed Tracing, Metrics and Context Propagation for applications running on the JVM
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 6 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the `kamon-io/kamon` repository, focusing on improving and maintaining the Datadog integration for distributed tracing and metrics. Their work involved fixing differences between versions, adding unit tests to validate functionality, addressing connection leaks, and providing configuration options for filtering tags. Additionally, the user implemented a configuration-based measurement formatter and packet buffer for efficient data handling.
propagationcontext-propagationkamontracingotel
akka/akka
Mar 2016 - May 2016
A platform to build and run apps that are elastic, agile, and resilient. SDK, libraries, and hosted environments.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 38 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:David's contributions primarily involve modifications and additions to the Akka Streams library. They addressed a layout issue in documentation CSS, introduced a new feature, `recoverWithRetries`, to the Java DSL of Akka Streams, and added a flag to the `takeWhile` operation, providing more control over stream processing. The user also optimized the `mapAsync` stage by skipping future dispatch when the result is already available.
resilientactor-modelreactiveconcurrentdistributed-actors
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.