James Kao
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarJames Kao is a Senior Platform Engineer with 10 years of experience building and operating reliable backend systems, now at Aptos Labs after a multi-year tenure at Confluent. He has deep hands-on expertise in Kafka ecosystem tooling—contributing to widely used connectors like Kafka Connect S3, JDBC, and HDFS—and has driven cost-saving infrastructure migrations and CI modernizations. At Confluent he reduced artifact and storage costs dramatically, implemented service catalogs and SLO dashboards, and led disaster recovery and automation efforts that improved reliability and observability. A Cal Poly SLO alumnus and co-founder of SLO Hacks, he blends strong engineering with proven mentorship and event-building experience. He favors pragmatic, infrastructure-as-code approaches and has a track record of shipping backend changes, improving testing, and tightening operational guardrails. Notably, his open-source contributions show attention to connector configuration, schema evolution, and practical docs that help teams run Kafka integrations in production.
10 years of coding experience
Github Skills (24)
avro10
confluent10
kafka-connect10
kafka-connector10
kafka10
hdfs10
hadoop10
jdbc10
kafka-streams10
java10
javas10
apache-kafka10
streaming10
build-system9
databases9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
confluentinc/kafka-connect-hdfs
Sep 2021 - Sep 2021
Kafka Connect HDFS connector
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 1 PR, 11 pushes in 1 day
Contributions summary:James's commits focus on merging branches and integrating changes, specifically within the Kafka Connect HDFS connector. They modified Java code, primarily in the `DataWriter.java` file, indicating work related to data writing and HDFS interaction. These modifications suggest the user contributed to the core functionality of the connector, potentially including Kerberos authentication, file management, and Hive integration. There are also tests for features like Hive integration using Avro and Parquet formats.
sinkapache-kafkakafka-connectorconnectorkafka-connect-hdfs
confluentinc/kafka-connect-storage-cloud
Sep 2021 - Sep 2021
Kafka Connect suite of connectors for Cloud storage (Amazon S3)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 2 PRs, 11 pushes in 1 day
Contributions summary:James's commits primarily involve merging branches and updating documentation related to schema evolution and quickstart guides for the Kafka Connect S3 connector. They made changes to the configuration options of the S3 connector including S3 Server Side Encryption, compression type, and retry attempts. The user also updated the Java code related to the connector's configuration and testing, demonstrating their involvement in backend development and maintenance.
sinkconfluent-cloudamazonamazon-s3cloud
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