Eric Saunders
Director Of Engineering at Stellar Development Foundation
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEric Saunders is a Director of Engineering with 13 years of experience building and leading teams that deliver resilient, open-source platform software for blockchain and distributed systems. Based in Santa Barbara, he currently runs Stellar's Horizon API and SDK ecosystem, combining deep Go backend expertise with TypeScript and developer tooling oversight. His background spans hands-on engineering—implementing robust database migration and schema management in Stellar's public Go monorepo—to higher-level leadership roles running multi-discipline engineering organizations and multi-million dollar budgets at Las Cumbres Observatory. Eric pairs a research-driven mindset (PhD in Astrophysics and HPC training) with pragmatic production chops, having designed NP-hard scheduling systems for global robotic telescopes and production serverless services on AWS. An active open-source contributor and technical writer, he focuses on clarity, maintainability, and developer experience across complex, long-lived systems.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), High Performance Computing, Master of Science (MSc), High Performance Computing at The University of EdinburghMSci, Physics, MSci, Physics at University of DurhamDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Astrophysics at University of Exeter
English, French, Latin
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
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Github Skills (15)
go10
schema-design10
postgresql10
schema10
kivy10
db-schema10
blockchain10
documentation10
database-schema10
cryptocurrency9
horizon9
markdown-it9
markdown9
ui-design4
python3
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
stellar/go
Jan 2019 - Apr 2020
Stellar's public monorepo of go code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 76 reviews, 50 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Eric primarily focused on implementing and refining database migration logic within the Horizon service, a component of the Stellar blockchain ecosystem. Their work included setting up data structures, differentiating migration sets, and streamlining down migrations. Additionally, they contributed to database schema management and improved the process of applying database migrations.
horizongolangmonorepoblockchainstellar
kivy/kivy
Jun 2013 - Jun 2013
Open source UI framework written in Python, running on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:11 commits in 6 days
Contributions summary:Eric primarily contributed to the documentation of the Kivy framework. Their commits focused on correcting typos, fixing grammatical errors, and ensuring consistency in the documentation. They linked to external resources and made minor updates to examples and tutorials. The user's work improved the clarity and accuracy of the documentation, making it easier for users to understand and utilize the Kivy framework.
pythonlinux-windowswindowsui-frameworklinux
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