Jarek Kowalski
Principal Engineer at Snowflake
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJarek Kowalski is a Principal Engineer with 22 years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, currently driving architecture and reliability at Snowflake in Redmond. He spent a decade at Google leading cloud game server and compute/storage platforms, blending deep systems engineering with product-focused leadership. An active open-source maintainer, he founded Kopia and nlog and contributes to Agones, where his work improved SDK modularity, controller isolation, and observability for multiplayer game hosting on Kubernetes. Jarek combines backend, DevOps, and storage expertise—having optimized content indexing, caching, and repository APIs for high-performance backup tooling—with an early background in real-time game development. Known for pragmatic refactors that unlock operational scale, he pairs hands-on coding with strategic platform thinking.
22 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Science, MSc Computer Science at University of Warsaw
Polish
Stackoverflow
56reputation
654reached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (23)
kubernetes10
git-repository10
gameserver10
repo-management10
go10
prometheus10
performance-optimization10
kubernetes-pods10
management10
devops10
server10
grpc10
repository-pattern10
controller9
dockers9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
kopia/kopia
Dec 2015 - Jan 2023
Cross-platform backup tool for Windows, macOS & Linux with fast, incremental backups, client-side end-to-end encryption, compression and data deduplication. CLI and GUI included.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:57 releases, 751 reviews, 1926 commits in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jarek refactored the content index and added caching, resulting in significant performance improvements. They also implemented a new API for prefetching content. Furthermore, they worked on server-side snapshot retention policies and improved the functionality of several key components, including better handling of context cancelation and logging. The user also made various improvements to both the gRPC and HTTP-based repository APIs.
google-cloud-storagebackupclidata-deduplicationend-to-end
googleforgames/agones
Dec 2018 - Oct 2019
Dedicated Game Server Hosting and Scaling for Multiplayer Games on Kubernetes
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:33 commits, 49 PRs, 18 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Jarek's contributions primarily revolve around improving the Agones SDK and the project's operational aspects. They extracted SDK server functionality from the `gameservers` package, enhancing modularity. Furthermore, the user added documentation and improved the isolation of Agones controllers by introducing taints and priority classes. They also focused on improving monitoring by refining Prometheus and Grafana configurations, and made the QPS and number of workers configurable for the controller. These changes highlight a focus on refactoring, infrastructure, and performance.
golanghostingagonesdedicated-game-serversgames
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