Henry Robinson
Principal Software Engineer at Slack
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHenry Robinson is a Principal Software Engineer based in London with 16 years designing and operating distributed systems and databases. He helped build Cloudera from its earliest days—contributing to core projects like Impala, Flume and ZooKeeper—and later led backend architecture at Slack after a long tenure as Senior Staff Engineer. His open-source footprint includes bug fixes and optimizations in heavyweight projects such as Apache Spark and ZooKeeper, notably addressing SQL/Parquet predicate pushdown and quorum/read-only behavior. Henry combines deep systems-level expertise with production-hardened judgement from scaling platforms through IPO-era growth and hyperscale operational demands. He began in quantitative trading systems at Goldman Sachs and pursued advanced research in distributed algorithms at Cambridge, a background that surfaces in pragmatic, provably robust designs. Colleagues rely on him for subtle correctness improvements in complex distributed code paths that most engineers never see.
16 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of CambridgeBSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at University of York
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (17)
debug10
spark10
big-data10
distributed-systems10
zookeeper10
java10
scala10
javas10
sql10
parquet10
consensus9
configuration-management9
antlr9
performance-optimization8
databases7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
apache/zookeeper
Dec 2009 - Sep 2012
Apache ZooKeeper
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:43 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Henry primarily contributed to the Apache ZooKeeper project, making changes related to server-side logic and core functionalities. The commits focus on fixing bugs, implementing improvements in areas like quorum management, read-only mode, and quota handling. These changes involve modifications to Java code, indicating a strong focus on back-end development within the distributed systems context of ZooKeeper.
zookeeperservice-discoverycloudnativeconfiguration-managementapache-zookeeper
apache/spark
Nov 2017 - Nov 2017
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 commit, 18 PRs, 87 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Henry contributed to the Apache Spark project by addressing issues related to SQL and Parquet. They fixed deprecation warnings in the SQL parser and optimized complex type simplification rules. The user also addressed an implicit cartesian product issue and added a test to detect a Parquet predicate pushdown bug.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
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