Grant Henke is a Senior Vice President of Engineering with 13 years of experience building web and big data platforms and leading engineering teams at phData and Cloudera. He excels at turning complex, tedious problems into simple, fast, and enjoyable solutions, with hands-on expertise across Hadoop ecosystems, Kafka, Kudu, Impala, Scalding and related open-source projects. An active Apache committer for Kudu and Kafka, he has shipped backend fixes that improved concurrency, schema drift handling, timestamp ingest, compression, and multi-arch Docker builds—work that surfaces in widely used projects like Apache NiFi and Kafka. Grant moves quickly between leadership and deep technical work, adapting to new codebases and adding immediate product and team value. Based in Greater Milwaukee, he pairs a pragmatic engineering mindset with a passion for continuous learning in open source, and often contributes practical infrastructure improvements that quietly boost reliability and developer experience.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, 3.52, B.S., Computer Science, 3.52 at University of Wisconsin-Platteville
Contributions:1 release, 158 commits, 1 PR in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Grant's commits primarily focus on improving the Docker build process for the Apache Kudu project. They made significant changes to the `docker-build.py` script, including generating all tags in a single build command and adding support for building and pushing multi-arch images, specifically ARM and multi-arch Docker images. Additionally, the user modified the build process to include UBI-based runtime images for CentOS builds.
Contributions:120 commits, 139 PRs, 855 comments in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Grant contributed to the Apache Kafka project by implementing features related to compression and addressing various issues in the code. Their commits include modifications to the `RecordAccumulatorTest`, `RecordAccumulator.java`, and `SenderTest.java` files, indicating involvement in the producer and client components. They also fixed hardcoded strings and other minor issues.
apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka
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Grant Henke - Senior Vice President Of Engineering at phData