John Bresnahan
Principal Engineer at University of Chicago
Kapaa, Hawaii, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Bresnahan is a Principal Engineer with more than two decades of experience building distributed computing systems, from early Grid and Nimbus projects to shaping modern cloud and graph database infrastructure. He was a core OpenStack contributor and architected production-grade services at Dell and Stardog, where he led the development of managed Stardog Cloud, Kubernetes operators, Helm charts, and Terraform-backed SaaS offerings. His work blends deep systems research—authoring protocols like LANTorrent and GridFTP—with pragmatic operational engineering, including CI/CD, chaos testing, and multi-cloud abstraction layers. Known for adding resilience features such as standby and cache nodes for highly available clusters, he also integrates enterprise auth and backup systems (Kerberos, OAuth2, JWT, S3) into product stacks. Based in Kapaa, Hawaii, he combines a research-rooted mindset from Argonne and a University of Chicago MS with hands-on leadership that turns experimental distributed algorithms into reliable, customer-facing services. An understated strength is his ability to standardize and professionalize release and infrastructure processes, reducing downtime and accelerating time-to-production.
15 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Northern Illinois UniversityMS Computer Science, MS Computer Science at University of Chicago
English
Github Skills (58)
stardog10
graph10
terraform10
chaos10
infrastructure-as-code10
python-bindings10
cloud-computing9
python9
docker9
api9
datadog8
auth8
knowledge-graph8
apache8
rest8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
quest-oss/unix-agent
Sep 2015 - Mar 2016
Contributions:53 PRs, 38 pushes, 14 branches in 6 months
unixagentcloud-managerclouddell
stardog-union/stardog-graviton
Jan 2017 - Oct 2021
Stardog Graviton has been deprecated. Please see our helm charts for similar functionality on Kubernetes.
Contributions:10 releases, 2 reviews, 130 commits in 4 years 9 months
helmkubernetesstardog
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