Francois Saint-jacques
Senior Staff Software Developer at Shopify
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFrancois Saint-jacques is a Senior Staff Software Developer with 15 years of experience building high-performance back-end systems and data infrastructure, now driving engineering at Shopify from Montreal. He has deep C/C++ expertise and a strong performance-engineering mindset demonstrated by low-latency UDP services, a C++ disruptor implementation, and contributions to SIMD-optimized RoaringBitmap code. Francois has significant open-source impact—working on Apache Arrow’s casting and conversion logic and tooling around Kafka consumers like kcat—bringing production-grade improvements and tests to widely used projects. Comfortable across systems, distributed data, and ML code, he pairs pragmatic refactoring with careful memory and concurrency work. Colleagues know him as a prototyping addict who prefers the shell, turning quick experiments into robust, maintainable solutions.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Cegep, Computer Science - Networking, Cegep, Computer Science - Networking at Collège MaisonneuveBachelor, Computer Science - Mathematics, Bachelor, Computer Science - Mathematics at Université de Montréal
French, English
Stackoverflow
456reputation
19kreached
13answers
2questions
Github Skills (65)
python10
multithreading10
testing10
command-line-interface10
bash10
cmake10
c1110
c1710
apache-arrow10
cpp10
concurrency10
optimization10
data-conversion10
avx10
memory-management10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
fsaintjacques/disruptor--
Sep 2011 - Aug 2015
disruptor concurency pattern in c++
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:143 commits, 1 PR, 65 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Francois focused on optimizing the performance of a C++ disruptor concurrency pattern implementation. Their primary contributions involved refactoring the code to remove dependencies like Boost, utilizing C++0x features such as `std::thread`, and improving memory management. These changes led to significant performance improvements, as evidenced by the performance test implementations. The user also integrated autotools for building the project.
cppconcurencydisruptorc-plus-pluscpp17
apache/arrow
Nov 2018 - Feb 2021
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 134 commits, 284 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Francois focused on the implementation of improvements to data conversion and casting within the Apache Arrow library. They addressed bugs, improved code coverage for various data types, and refactored the existing code base to improve efficiency. They also analyzed and adapted the cast options used by several languages like Python, Ruby, and R and considered their impact on the current C++ implementation. Furthermore, the user also added tests.
memorymulti-languagetoolboxacceleratedarrow
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