John Billings
Member Of Technical Staff at Stealth Startup
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Billings is a seasoned Member of Technical Staff with 15 years building reliable, large-scale backend and deployment systems from Yelp to Meta and early-stage startups in San Francisco. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and combines deep academic rigor with practical experience in service discovery, PaaS, and deployment automation. An active open-source contributor, his work on high-profile projects like Airbnb’s Synapse and Yelp’s PaaSTA focused on HAProxy integration, Zookeeper pooling, rate limiting, and robust deployment scripts—improving reliability and ops velocity. Comfortable as an individual contributor and tech lead, he translates complex distributed-systems challenges into production-ready tooling and repeatable processes. Notably, his background spans both search engineering and platform ops, giving him a rare cross-cutting view of system performance, deployments, and developer DX.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (19)
kubernetes10
docker10
zookeeper10
dockers10
cicd10
ruby10
automation10
infrastructure10
kubernetes-pods10
automations10
haproxy10
paas10
rate-limiting9
python9
yaml8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
airbnb/synapse
Apr 2014 - Mar 2017
A transparent service discovery framework for connecting an SOA
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:11 commits, 3 PRs, 3 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving the HAProxy integration within the Synapse service discovery framework. Their contributions included updating socket commands, adding features such as a rate limiter and state file management, and fixing caching logic. They also made improvements to Zookeeper connection pooling. These changes indicate a focus on improving the reliability and performance of the service discovery framework.
soatransparentservice-discoverydiscovery
Yelp/paasta
Apr 2014 - May 2015
An open, distributed platform as a service
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:20 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving and maintaining the PaaSTA platform's infrastructure and deployment tools. Their contributions included adding new scripts and functionalities for service deployment, generating configuration files, and integrating with smartstack. The user also worked on fixing integration tests and cleaning up dependencies within the project. Their work demonstrates a strong understanding of deployment automation and service management.
mesosdockerplatform-as-a-servicedistributed-systemsmicroservices
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