Elise Gafford
Lead Software Engineer (Big Data)
Keene, New Hampshire, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolElise Gafford is a Lead Software Engineer specializing in big data and cloud-native storage, with 11 years of experience building and operating distributed systems at companies like Red Hat and ASCO's CancerLinQ®. She combines deep hands-on skills in backend API design, distributed filesystems (notably contributions to Rook and Red Hat's OCS operator), and cloud orchestration with a strong QA and testing background. An Agile evangelist and coach, she has led process improvements and cross-team collaboration while maintaining core upstream open-source projects. Her technical breadth spans Python, Java, Go, Hadoop, Ceph, Kubernetes, and both relational and NoSQL stores, enabling her to bridge infrastructure and application concerns. Unusually for an engineer at her level, she also draws on prior nursing and religious-studies training, which informs a mission-driven approach to teamwork and product impact.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts, Religious Studies, Bachelor of Arts, Religious Studies at Brown UniversityBachelor of Science, Nursing, Bachelor of Science, Nursing at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (15)
ceph10
storage10
kubernetes10
automation10
automations10
develop10
go10
cloud-native10
resource-management10
cicd10
kubernetes-pods10
operator10
dockers9
yaml9
docker9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
red-hat-storage/ocs-operator
Nov 2019 - Mar 2021
Operator for RHOCS
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:15 reviews, 15 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Elise primarily contributed to the automation and configuration of the `ocs-operator` repository. They focused on improving OSD memory limits and configuring cgroup settings, which involved changes to reconcile.go and resources.go. Furthermore, the user implemented adjustments to maintain rack failure domain assignments and refactored StorageClass and SnapshotClass management, showing expertise in operator development and resource management within a Kubernetes environment. This work streamlined the operator's functionality and management strategies.
kubernetes-operatorkubernetesoperator
rook/rook
Oct 2019 - Mar 2020
Storage Orchestration for Kubernetes
Role in this project:Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:16 commits, 21 PRs, 72 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Elise primarily focused on enhancing the Ceph storage orchestration within the Rook/Rook repository. They addressed race conditions and improved reliability by generating keyrings before deployment creation and standardizing keyring association. Further contributions include refactoring keyring association, updating CSI resources, and implementing a cleanup policy for Ceph clusters. They also worked on fixing issues for various daemon deployments to ensure robust operation of the storage cluster.
etcddata-protectionorchestrationdockerceph
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