Davide Cavalca
Production Engineer, Linux Userspace at Fedora Project
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavide Cavalca is a seasoned production engineer with 18 years of experience building and operating Linux systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, currently focused on Linux userspace at Meta. He has deep kernel and OS expertise from prior roles at Meta spanning kernel, operating systems, and cluster operations, and routinely bridges low-level system engineering with large-scale production reliability. An active open-source maintainer and contributor, Davide has improved tooling like Chef/Ohai and contributed to high-profile projects such as MAME, where he added platform-specific software lists for SGI and HP-UX systems. He is also a long-time community leader in the Linux ecosystem—holding leadership roles in CentOS, Fedora/EPEL, and Asahi Linux—bringing both governance experience and hands-on development to cross-project collaboration. Notably, he blends production-grade DevOps automation with device- and architecture-level knowledge, helping large fleets and niche platforms coexist reliably.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Engineering, MSc Computer Engineering at Università di PaviaDiploma, Diploma at Liceo Scientifico
Italian, English
Github Skills (31)
c-language10
oai10
configuration-management10
linux10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
hp-ux10
infrastructure10
sys10
infrastructure-as-code10
systemd10
chef-solo10
automations10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/chef-cookbooks
Apr 2016 - Jan 2023
Open source chef cookbooks.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:60 reviews, 268 commits, 54 PRs in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Davide primarily contributed to the development of the `fb_apt` cookbook, which is used to configure Debian/Ubuntu systems to work with the Facebook environment. Their contributions included adding and removing keys for APT repositories, modifying the source list, and general refactoring, specifically to address comments on previous pull requests. Furthermore, they demonstrated DevOps skills by working on the build and deployment of the infrastructure configurations within the Chef repository.
chef-resourcemanaged-by-terraformchefcookbooks
facebook/IT-CPE
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
Meta's Client Platform Engineering tools. Some of the tools we have written to help manage our fleet of client systems.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:23 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Davide primarily contributes to the automation and management of infrastructure within the Chef ecosystem. They are focused on developing and maintaining custom resources and helper methods for managing system reboots, handling file serialization, and ensuring proper configurations. The user demonstrates expertise in defining platform-specific behaviors and extending Chef capabilities with custom functionalities.
metaengineeringfleetplatform-engineeringtools-engineering
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