James Koll
Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Whatnot
Barrington, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Koll is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in cloud infrastructure and SRE practices, currently driving infrastructure work at Whatnot after helping scale deployments at dbt Labs. He brings four years in senior infrastructure roles plus a longer track record in SRE and cloud operations, with deep hands-on experience in AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm and CloudFormation. A former physicist on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, James applies scientific rigor and experimental thinking to performance tuning and scalable system design. He’s passionate about automation, maintainability, cross-training, and documentation, and advocates organizational practices that prevent long-term operational debt. Colocating technical leadership with practical tooling, he has improved cluster performance and the scalability of multi-tenant SaaS deployments through careful study of Kubernetes internals and pragmatic use of off-the-shelf technologies.
4 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Mathematics, Bachelor’s Degree Mathematics at Iowa State UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics at Michigan State University
English
Github Skills (3)
code-behind10
api3
dbt2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (4)
jameskoll-dbt/jaffle_shop
Aug 2022 - Jul 2024
A self-contained dbt project for testing purposes
Contributions:3 branches in 1 year 11 months
dbttestingsqlself-contained
dbt-labs/changelog-generator
Feb 2022 - Mar 2022
Contributions:2 reviews, 2 PRs, 3 pushes in 6 days
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