Joseph Burnett
Principal Engineer at GitLab
Wenatchee, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoseph Burnett is a Principal Engineer with 13 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, currently shaping deployment and administrative APIs for App Engine at Google Cloud and now driving backend strategy at GitLab. A former Marine, he blends operational discipline with deep technical expertise in autoscaling, Kubernetes, and serverless (notably contributions to Knative and Kubernetes HPA). He’s a hands-on engineer who’s implemented core diff/patch logic in open-source tooling and worked across the stack—from sonic-pi’s live web GUI to high-impact autoscaler improvements for multi-tenant environments. Known for improving reliability and scale-to-zero behaviors, he pairs rigorous testing and automation with pragmatic design. Based in Wenatchee, WA, he brings a proven track record of moving cloud-native features from prototype to production at major platforms.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at Tufts UniversityAA Political Science, AA Political Science at Highline College
English
Github Skills (31)
autoscaling10
json10
kubernetes10
container10
javascript10
testing10
go10
front-end-development10
kubernetes-pods10
serverless10
devops10
live-coding10
clojurescript10
data-structure9
back-end-development9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
josephburnett/jd
Nov 2016 - Dec 2022
JSON diff and patch
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:24 releases, 7 reviews, 309 commits in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Joseph primarily focused on implementing core functionalities for the JSON diff and patch tool, creating the `jsonNode.equals` method for comparing nodes, and implementing the `diff` method. They added types for various JSON structures like `JsonString`, `JsonList`, `JsonStruct` and `JsonNumber`. They also developed tests for verifying equality and difference between JSON objects and performed unit tests and integration tests for JSON Patch (RFC 6902) using different data formats. They implemented `RenderPatch` and `RenderMerge` for generating various diff output formats.
patchjson-diffdeltajqjson
knative/serving
Feb 2018 - Jun 2019
Kubernetes-based, scale-to-zero, request-driven compute
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:58 commits, 45 PRs, 12 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Joseph's commits primarily focused on the development and enhancement of the autoscaler component within the Knative serving project. They implemented features related to autoscaling behavior, including setting CPU targets, handling concurrency, and integrating DNS resolution. The user also contributed to the reliability of the autoscaler and improved the performance metrics, including the transition to a multi-tenant autoscaler. Furthermore, the user addressed scaling down to zero and refactored the activator code.
golangzerodeveloper-productivitynetworkingserverless
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