Etienne Marais
Principal Engineer at GoDaddy
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEtienne Marais is a Principal Engineer based in the Western Cape with nine years of experience building backend systems, mentoring teams, and driving pragmatic, thorough solutions. He blends hands-on backend expertise—from PHP full‑stack roots to distributed architectures—with leadership roles at GoDaddy and startups like Over, bringing product-minded engineering to scale. A practical open-source contributor, he has worked on Irmin, a Git-inspired distributed database, touching core data structures and GraphQL interfaces. Etienne prioritizes people over process, coaching teams to challenge the status quo while implementing simple designs that have real user impact. Curious about distributed systems and the indie web, he pairs broad technical depth with a clear focus on shipping durable, thoughtful software.
9 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, Multimedia, Programming, Graphics, Networks, Security, BSc Computer Science, Multimedia, Programming, Graphics, Networks, Security at University of Pretoria
Stackoverflow
1reputation
325reached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (13)
git10
databases10
develop10
backend10
database10
ocaml10
wpgraphql9
wordpress-graphql9
graphql9
html6
js-of-ocaml6
svg6
javascript6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
mirage/irmin
Oct 2021 - Apr 2022
Irmin is a distributed database that follows the same design principles as Git
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:60 reviews, 27 commits, 11 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Etienne contributed to the `irmin/irmin` repository, which is a distributed database. They worked on implementing features related to paths within the command-line interface, enabling support for empty paths. The user also conformed the `irmin-graphql` interface with path/Path notation and made changes to the backend related to the notation of "P" to "B." The changes touch upon core data structures and the GraphQL interface, indicating contributions to the backend functionality of the database.
design-principlesprinciplesocamldistributed-databasedatabase
maiste/equinoxe
Nov 2021 - Aug 2022
Wrapper to Equinix API - Archived
Contributions:7 releases, 23 reviews, 252 commits in 9 months
apiequinixocamlocaml-library
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