Josh Bowen
Chief Executive Officer at Astria Labs
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJosh Bowen is a technology executive and former hands-on engineer with 11 years of experience building distributed systems and developer infrastructure from Google to blockchain infrastructure startups. As CEO of Astria Labs and an earlier software engineer at Celestia Labs, he combines product leadership with deep backend and DevOps experience—especially around data availability, key management, and node initialization for rollup and Celestia projects. His open-source contributions include enhancements to Rollkit and Celestia-node, where he improved DA-layer persistence, gRPC compatibility, websocket RPC handling, and keystore persistence—work that directly impacts production-grade blockchain node reliability. Based in Boulder, he pairs systems-level rigor from his electrical and computer engineering background with practical CI/CD and Docker experience. Colleagues would describe him as an operator who still digs into low-level implementation details to turn research and protocols into robust, deployable systems.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor’s Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Colorado at Boulder
English
Github Skills (14)
docker10
go10
key-value-store10
dockers10
grpc10
cicd9
blockchain9
data-availability9
githubaction-workflow9
github-ci9
command-line-interface8
cli8
command-line8
testing8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
rollkit/rollkit
Oct 2021 - Aug 2022
A modular framework for rollups, with an ABCI-compatible client interface.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:29 reviews, 145 commits, 29 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Josh focused on improving the data availability layer client within the Optimint framework. Their contributions included modifying the mock implementation to utilize a KVStore, ensuring data persistence and retrieval within the DA layer. They also addressed compatibility with Google's gRPC version, critical for integrating with the Cosmos SDK, and refactored the RPC handler to ensure proper websocket functionality. The user also made changes to support adding the ProposerAddress to the ValidatorInfo RPC response.
abcirollups
celestiaorg/celestia-node
Dec 2021 - Nov 2022
Celestia Data Availability Nodes
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:26 reviews, 12 commits, 22 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the Celestia-node repository by modifying core functionalities related to key management and node initialization. They updated the code to persist generated keys to a keystore and reuse existing keys. The user also worked on updating the Docker entrypoint script to use new flag names and added testing capabilities, demonstrating an understanding of CI/CD pipelines. Furthermore, they focused on improving logging and making adjustments to flags used by the bridge and header functionalities.
availabilitynodesdata-availability-samplingcelestiadata-availability
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