Julian Tescher
Principal Engineer at Phantom
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJulian Tescher is a Principal Engineer in San Francisco with 14 years of experience building high-performance engineering teams and shipping production systems. A serial founder and engineering leader, he co-founded several startups including Bitski and WillCall before moving into senior engineering roles and now leading architecture and delivery at Phantom. He is a hands-on Rust contributor with notable work across high-profile projects like crates.io, OpenTelemetry Rust, tokio-tracing, and ruma, improving tracing, federation APIs, and registry UX/backend integrations. Julian blends backend systems expertise with full-stack sensibilities—implementing S3 immutable caching, search UX improvements, and refining tracing traits for performance and spec compliance. Known for pragmatic refactors and clear documentation, he pairs startup grit with open-source craftsmanship to drive reliable, maintainable systems.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Business Information Systems Psychology Business Information Systems Psychology, Business Information Systems Psychology Business Information Systems Psychology at University of Washington
German, English
Stackoverflow
778reputation
28kreached
5answers
4questions
Github Skills (45)
markdown10
matrix10
software-design10
tracer10
predictionio10
api-design10
data-serialization10
serialization10
scala10
markdown-it10
amazon-s310
aws-s310
opentelemetry10
logging10
rust10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
The Rust OpenTelemetry implementation
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 releases, 554 reviews, 41 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Julian made several commits focused on simplifying and refining core tracing traits within the OpenTelemetry Rust implementation. These changes involved removing unnecessary requirements from traits such as `TracerProvider`, `Tracer`, and `Span`, optimizing for performance and clarity. The user also worked on splitting `tracer` and `versioned_tracer` methods to comply with the specification and switching to parent context references. Additional contributions included removing unused methods, fixing documentation, and refactoring the code to improve the overall design of the tracing library.
zipkinapirusttracinglogging
tokio-rs/tracing
Oct 2019 - Sep 2022
Application level tracing for Rust.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:52 reviews, 61 commits, 93 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Julian primarily contributed to the `tracing` project, which focuses on application-level tracing in Rust. Their work involved fixing typos and improving code clarity across various files, including examples, core library files, and tests. They also integrated the `tracing-opentelemetry` crate, enabling OpenTelemetry integration and adding support for dynamic span names and special values from `tracing-log`. Furthermore, the user made updates to support the latest OpenTelemetry specification, including modifications to the `SpanExt` trait and the underlying code structure.
rusttracinglogginglogging-librarylogging-facade
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