John Kerl
Staff Software Engineer at Datadog
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Kerl is a Staff Software Engineer with 13+ years building production-grade, polyglot systems across cloud, observability, and data-storage domains. He blends hands-on backend engineering, ops-minded service ownership, and team leadership—most recently leading multi-language APIs and the SOMA project at TileDB before joining Datadog. His work spans high-throughput distributed services at AWS and Facebook to low-level embedded and scientific computing, reflecting deep experience in C/C++, Python, Java, Go, and deployment tooling. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved core functionality and observability in projects like TileDB and Miller (adding rich datetime and instrumentation support). He favors self-explanatory code, transparent metrics, and force-multiplying tools that reduce on-call burden and accelerate users. Outside work he’s a nerd/dad who brings mathematical rigor from PhD-level research to practical system design.
13 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
The University of ArizonaM.A. Mathematics, M.A. Mathematics at Arizona State University
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
51reputation
1kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (44)
storage-engine10
sparse-array10
c-language10
api-design10
typed-array10
multidimensional-arrays10
dsl10
date-parsing10
arrayobject10
dynamic-array10
java10
regular-expression10
javas10
go10
hash10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
johnkerl/miller
May 2015 - Jan 2023
Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:86 releases, 34 reviews, 8324 commits in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:John contributed to the Miller project by addressing date-time-related issues, making changes to the DSL's built-in function manager and incorporating support for new time-related functions and features like `strftime`, `strptime`, and time zone handling, adding code for the `systime`, `systimeint`, and `uptime` built-in functions. Their work included extensive modifications to the DSL grammar and its built-in functions, with a focus on improving performance and providing users with improved functionality.
tabularcsvdata-reductionpythonawk
facebook/ThreatExchange
Aug 2019 - Aug 2020
Trust & Safety tools for working together to fight digital harms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:232 commits, 83 PRs, 68 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:John contributed to multiple aspects of the facebook/threatexchange repository, including adding features, improving the codebase and enhancing the tools. Their work involved implementing new functionalities, such as a way to post threat descriptors using Java, as well as improving existing ones by integrating the support for different output formats. They also demonstrated DevOps skills by working on various scripts and setting up the environment to deploy different projects.
queryingsecurityshufflecybersecurityblue-team
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