John Cairns
Principal Engineer at Fabric
Naperville, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Cairns is a Principal Engineer based in Naperville, Illinois, with over 30 years of hands-on experience building high-performance, highly scalable distributed systems across finance, ad tech, and Web3. He combines low-level systems expertise in C++ and Rust with blockchain development in Solidity and cross-chain protocols, recently architecting decentralized-exchange indexing and routing systems for Fabric. A proven leader and mentor, John has led teams at startups and major trading firms to deliver production trading engines, ultra-low-latency servers, and enterprise-scale data infrastructures on AWS. His background in physics and early work on particle simulations informs a rigorous, measurement-driven approach to performance engineering and protocol design. Equally at home optimizing JVM garbage behavior or writing lock-free data structures as he is implementing smart contracts, he brings rare breadth from kernel-level tuning to protocol-level interoperability. Outside work he describes himself as a Unix tinkerer, musician, and “space traveler,” hinting at a curiosity-driven mindset that fuels continual learning.
10 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
BS Physics, BS Physics at Colorado State UniversityMS Physics, MS Physics at The Ohio State University
Stackoverflow
196reputation
26kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (66)
docker-desktop10
blocking-queue10
malware10
hosts-file10
java10
hosts10
latency9
jmh9
python9
security9
privacy9
r-tree9
lmax9
bytecode8
solidity8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
jac18281828/crucible
Aug 2021 - Jun 2025
Contributions:32 pushes, 6 branches in 3 years 10 months
conversant/disruptor
Dec 2015 - Oct 2022
Disruptor BlockingQueue
Contributions:21 releases, 6 reviews, 30 commits in 6 years 11 months
blocking-queuedisruptorconversantmedia-disruptordisruptor-blockingqueuejava
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