David Robertson
Lead Backend Engineer at Octopus Money
Watford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Robertson is a Lead Backend Engineer with 11 years' experience building and operating high-scale, production backend systems, currently leading backend efforts at Octopus Money. A former mathematics PhD in group theory, he brings rigorous problem-solving and a focus on type safety to distributed systems, having improved static typing across major Python projects. He operated Element's flagship Matrix deployment (millions of users and messages) and has hands-on expertise in CI/CD, containerisation and productionising urgent services. An active open-source contributor, his work on Synapse and Python type stubs emphasises build/test infrastructure, maintainability and developer experience. Colleagues recognise him for clear technical writing, empathetic stakeholder communication and elevated code quality.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics (group theory), Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics (group theory) at Newcastle University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (29)
static-typing10
typesc10
python10
stub10
stubs10
testing10
mypy10
dynamic-typing10
typescript10
bash10
implicit-typing10
cicd10
type-system10
type-annotations10
optional-typing10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
matrix-org/synapse
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Synapse: Matrix homeserver written in Python/Twisted.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:37 releases, 3085 reviews, 933 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:David's commits primarily focused on improving the build and testing infrastructure for Synapse. They refactored and updated CI/CD scripts, particularly for the portdb job, to leverage poetry and containerization. Additionally, the user removed deprecated Buildkite CI tests and fixed issues in various testing pipelines. They also contributed by fixing typechecking and adding documentation, suggesting a strong focus on code quality and maintainability.
pythonmatrix-synapsematrix-synapse-homeserverhomeservermatrix
pyca/pynacl
Nov 2021 - Dec 2021
Python binding to the Networking and Cryptography (NaCl) library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 20 commits, 20 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to enhancing the code quality and maintainability of the Python binding for the NaCl library. They focused on adding type annotations to the code, leveraging tools like Mypy to enforce type checking. Their work included annotating multiple modules, including `exceptions`, `encoding`, `utils`, `bindings` and `public`. The user also addressed mypy warnings, fixed typos, and made adjustments to the build configuration and testing setup.
cryptographypythonnetworkingnaclpython-binding
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