Joe Elliott
Principal Engineer at Grafana Labs
Louisville, Kentucky, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoe Elliott is a Principal Engineer with nine years of focused backend and observability experience, currently leading distributed tracing at Grafana Labs as the creator of Tempo and a Jaeger maintainer. He blends deep systems engineering with practical DevOps, having implemented high-performance storage (Parquet) in Tempo and improved sampling, protocol handling, and receivers across Jaeger and OpenTelemetry. Joe has driven scalable, multi-tenant Prometheus projects (Cortex, Mimir) and contributed to Loki and Grafana Agent, showing a knack for storage, ingestion and query frontend optimizations. His background includes directing enterprise infrastructure and Kubernetes platforms, and earlier work spanning enterprise applications, teaching, and embedded C++/.NET systems. Based in Louisville, he pairs hands-on implementation with release and documentation improvements—an engineer who ships core features and the operational plumbing that keeps them reliable.
9 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng Computer Engineering at University of Louisville - J.B. Speed School of Engineering, Bioengineering Department
Github Skills (60)
unit-testing10
monitoring10
kubernetes10
docker10
observability10
tracer10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
cassandra10
charts10
distributed-tracing10
amazon-elasticsearch10
testing10
microservices-application10
bash10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
grafana/tempo
Jan 2020 - Jan 2023
Grafana Tempo is a high volume, minimal dependency distributed tracing backend.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 2456 reviews, 1024 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Joe Elliott's contributions focused on implementing core features for the Grafana Tempo distributed tracing backend, mainly related to the storage component. His commits added significant features, notably integrating and optimizing the use of Parquet files, a columnar storage format, for data storage and search, including the addition of new trace levels, schema modifications, and features like the use of index and dedicated columns. His work included critical enhancements to the system's scalability and performance, particularly for the search functionality.
opentelemetrytracingtempovolumebackend
grafana/helm-charts
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:158 reviews, 262 commits, 146 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Joe primarily contributed to the documentation of the `grafana/helm-charts` repository, specifically focusing on the Tempo charts. Their commits involved updating README files within the `tempo` and `tempo-distributed` charts, adding upgrade notes, and providing clear instructions for users. The updates aimed to reflect changes in Tempo versions, including critical upgrade considerations and warnings.
kubenetesgrafanahelm-charts
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