Erik Ogan is a Staff Software Engineer with 17 years of experience who blends hands-on systems engineering with team and operational leadership, currently helping Academia.edu scale foundational platforms from San Francisco. He has repeatedly modernized data and engineering practices in regulated and high-traffic environments—most recently bringing standardization, testing, and CI-driven pipelines to One Medical/Amazon using Spark, Airflow, EMR, Kubernetes and Snowflake. A polyglot engineer comfortable from C/C++ and Perl/XS to Scala, Ruby on Rails, Python and Node.js, he pairs deep backend and data expertise with infrastructure-as-code and security-aware operations (Chef, Terraform, SELinux). Erik is an active open-source contributor—improving SoundCloud’s online MySQL migration tool and helping package Phusion Passenger across Linux distros—demonstrating a pragmatic focus on reliable deploys and migrations. He’s known for turning ad-hoc teams into repeatable delivery engines and for shipping revenue-driving features and data products at scale.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Project Management for Software Engineers, Project Management for Software Engineers at University of California at Berkeley Extension
Computer Science, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
A fast and robust web server and application server for Ruby, Python and Node.js
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Release Manager
Contributions:140 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Erik contributed to the build and release process for the Phusion Passenger project, focusing on RPM packaging. Their work involved modifying build scripts (buildall.sh, build.rb) to support building packages for multiple Fedora and RHEL/CentOS versions, including adapting to the mock build environment. They also made updates to documentation files and build targets.
Contributions summary:Erik primarily focused on enhancing the core functionality of the online MySQL schema migrations tool. Their contributions include the addition of features such as renaming columns while preserving data, the ability to remove indexes, and ensuring correct data handling in single-record tables. They also made changes to the underlying code to support these features, including modifications to the migrator, intersection, and chunker components, indicating a deep understanding of the migration process.
mysql-schemarakemysqlmigrationsschema-migrations
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Erik Ogan - Staff Software Engineer at Academia.edu