Houston Putman
Staff Software Engineer at The Apache Software Foundation
Los Altos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHouston Putman is a Staff Software Engineer based in Los Altos with a decade of experience building and operating search infrastructure at scale, currently at Apple. He is a long-standing Apache contributor—Lucene and Solr committer, PMC member, and former Solr PMC chair—who created the Kubernetes Solr Operator and regularly contributes to core Solr and Lucene bug fixes, tests, and release tooling. Houston combines backend engineering, DevOps, and test automation expertise, with notable work around S3 integrations, HTTP/2 client configuration, and randomized unit testing for analytics components. His career includes hands-on search infrastructure roles at Bloomberg and internships at Microsoft, and he brings the rigor of a Turing Scholars education from UT Austin. Colleagues rely on him to bridge open-source stewardship and production systems, turning subtle search correctness issues into robust, deployable fixes.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science Honors (Turing Scholars), Mathematics, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science Honors (Turing Scholars), Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin
Korean, English
Stackoverflow
16reputation
614reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (17)
lucene10
unit-testing10
search-engine10
testing10
information-retrieval10
solr10
java10
javas10
backend10
apache9
release-management9
build-automation8
nosql8
devops8
python7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
apache/solr
Feb 2023 - Mar 2023
Apache Solr open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:492 reviews, 42 commits, 360 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Houston primarily contributed to bug fixes and enhancements within the Apache Solr search engine. They addressed issues related to S3 directory checks and HTTP/2 client configurations. Furthermore, they modified scripts used by the release wizard and smoke tests, indicating involvement in the project's build, testing, and release processes. These changes included fixing version parsing and updating JAR checks.
nosqlsolrapachesearch-enginebackend
apache/lucene
Mar 2021 - Feb 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 9 PRs, 9 pushes in 4 years
Contributions summary:Houston contributed extensively to the Apache Lucene project by fixing numeric point field support in the Analytics component. They implemented unit tests, ensuring the robustness of the numeric fields with randomized testing. They also addressed various bugs within the Analytics component and enhanced unit tests to thoroughly validate the functionality of the system. The user also made improvements and added unit tests for the core Solr Cloud components.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
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