Hugo Firth
Staff Software Engineer at Neo4j
North Tyneside, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHugo Firth is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years’ experience designing and building distributed, highly available data systems, currently shaping technical strategy for Neo4j Aura and leading core distributed systems teams. He combines hands-on development—especially JVM and functional programming (Scala/Java, Spark/Hadoop)—with architecture, mentorship, and research, and has driven core database internals like causal clustering and Raft replication in the flagship neo4j/neo4j repo. Hugo’s background spans academia and industry, including a PhD in Computer Science and work on human-in-the-loop analytics, which informs his pragmatic, measurement-driven approach to complex systems. Equally comfortable coding or coordinating cross-team strategy, he’s known for turning subtle consistency and replication challenges into reliable production features. Less obvious: he’s as likely to prototype novel graph processing techniques as he is to dive into low-level leader election fixes that keep distributed clusters robust.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Stackoverflow
43reputation
911reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (15)
neo4j10
causal10
javas10
databases10
consensus10
raft10
distributed-systems10
clustering10
java10
database10
testing8
database-design8
php6
javascript6
jquery6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
neo4j/neo4j
Mar 2018 - Sep 2022
Graphs for Everyone
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:214 commits, 24 PRs, 11 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Hugo's commits focused on enhancing the reliability and functionality of the Neo4j database, particularly in the context of causal clustering and replication. They implemented a new leader listener and refined raft-related replication logic, suggesting deep engagement with core database internals. Their work also involved improvements to database aliases. They also made various fixes to database-management operations and to the internal class's.
neo4j-databasedirected-acyclic-graphnosqlgraphsdatabase
hugofirth/electrosity-game
Apr 2013 - Feb 2014
Contributions:5 commits in 9 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.