Jakob Taankvist
Senior Software Engineer at Uber
North Denmark Region, Denmark
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJakob Taankvist is a Senior Software Engineer with a PhD in Computer Science and nine years of experience building robust, scalable backend systems, currently contributing to Uber's engineering efforts. He is an active maintainer and back-end contributor to the widely used open-source Cadence workflow engine, focusing on rate limiting, code clarity, and maintainability for long-running distributed orchestration. His background blends formal methods and machine learning research from a PhD—applied historically to synthesis and optimization of strategies—with practical product and startup experience as a co-founder and CTO optimizing real-world traffic flows. Comfortable moving between research-grade C++/Java toolchains and production Go services, he brings a rare combination of academic rigor and hands-on distributed-systems engineering.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science Formal Methods and Machine Learning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science Formal Methods and Machine Learning at Aalborg UniversityStudent Natural Sciences, Student Natural Sciences at Vesthimmerlands GymnasiumMaster's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Université libre de Bruxelles
Danish, English, German
Github Skills (6)
distributed-systems10
rate-limiting10
go10
orchestration10
back-end-development10
testing9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
cadence-workflow/cadence
May 2023 - Apr 2025
Cadence is a distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine to execute asynchronous long-running business logic in a scalable and resilient way.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 162 reviews, 147 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Jakob primarily contributed to the back-end of the Cadence workflow engine. They focused on code improvements, fixing a confusing comment in the matching handler and refactoring existing code, such as moving dynamic rate limiters to their own files and creating a limiter struct. The user also implemented features related to rate limiting, incorporating different factories and testing for them. Overall, the contributions centered on improving the efficiency, clarity, and maintainability of the system.
cadenceresilientorchestration-engineservice-buslogic
jakobht/azurex
Nov 2020 - Nov 2022
Implementation of the Azure Blob Storage Rest API for elixir
Contributions:18 reviews, 77 commits, 63 PRs in 2 years
apiazure-blobblob-storageblobelixir
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