David Symonds
Staff Software Engineer at Canva
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Symonds is a Staff Software Engineer and cloud platform group tech lead at Canva with 18 years of experience building reliable, large-scale infrastructure and developer tools. He has led identity, SRE and regional reliability efforts at Atlassian, Google and Stripe, shaping technical vision across departments and mentoring the next generation of engineering leaders. A prolific open-source contributor in the Go ecosystem, his work touches core projects like the Go runtime, gRPC, protocol buffers and Google Cloud client libraries, often improving performance, correctness and test coverage. He combines deep systems and networking expertise with hands-on backend development—optimising memory and concurrency, fixing data races, and evolving APIs. Based in Sydney, he prefers non-finance roles and brings a pragmatic, cross-organisational approach to complex engineering challenges. One less obvious strength: he frequently improves tooling and tests, trading flashy features for long-term maintainability and developer productivity.
18 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Sydney
Stackoverflow
857reputation
14kreached
28answers
0questions
google-app-engine
top-5%
Github Skills (88)
google-cloud-platform10
mockk10
text-template10
testing10
http10
websocket10
file-operations10
cocoa10
gcp10
code-analysis10
regression-testing10
code-generation10
go-git10
network-protocol10
linter10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
golang/appengine
Jan 2014 - Apr 2016
Go App Engine packages
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:149 commits, 6 PRs, 53 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:David primarily worked on implementing and expanding the `golang/appengine` repository, a project containing Go packages for Google App Engine. Their contributions focused on adding and improving core functionality, particularly related to API calls, service integration, and the foundational structure for processing requests within the App Engine environment. The user added functionalities for logging, namespaces, and supporting internal APIs, including defining new service protos for the same. They also worked on improving the testing capabilities of the project.
golangapp-enginego
golang/protobuf
Apr 2010 - May 2018
Go support for Google's protocol buffers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:320 commits, 32 PRs, 105 pushes in 8 years 2 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the protobuf library by adding extension support to the generator, enabling the creation of descriptors for extensions and associated helper functions. The user's commits also include efforts to avoid namespace collisions. Furthermore, the user implemented code to handle and process text formatting with the objective of allowing users to create and view serialized messages. These contributions were crucial for adding features, enhancing code maintainability, and streamlining the development process.
golangprotocol-buffersbuffersprotobufgo
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