Karl Pietrzak

Collingswood, New Jersey, United States

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Summary

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Senior

🎓

Top School

Karl Pietrzak is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience blending hands-on backend engineering, performance tuning, and academic teaching. He teaches computer science topics ranging from UNIX and Java to security and forensics, and applies that pedagogical clarity to complex systems work in Java, AI/NLP, and compression. Karl has driven maintainability improvements in high-profile open-source projects like Confluent’s Kafka REST proxy, focusing on bug fixes and code quality that bolster production reliability. His career spans research and product roles—from lead research engineer at Two Six Labs to senior architect and CTO positions—bringing both deep technical rigor and product-minded leadership. Based in Collingswood, NJ, he pairs practical distributed systems experience (including Cassandra and JAX-RS migrations) with a knack for explaining complex topics to engineers and students alike.

13 years of coding experience

7 years of employment as a software developer

MS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology

Polish, Spanish

Github Skills (12)

javas10

kafka10

java10

api-design9

restful-api9

confluent9

rest-api9

api-rest9

debug8

simplify8

debugging8

simplification8

Programming languages (33)

C#CMakefileGoMustacheHTMLGroovyJupyter Notebook

Github contributions (5)

confluentinc/kafka-rest

Jul 2017 - Jul 2017

Confluent REST Proxy for Kafka

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:7 commits, 5 PRs, 1 comment in 7 days

Contributions summary:Karl primarily focused on improving code quality and maintainability within the Kafka REST proxy. Their contributions included simplifying code, correcting string comparisons, and importing missing dependencies. Specifically, they addressed issues related to potential bugs and code style, contributing to a more robust codebase. The user's changes targeted Java files and appeared focused on the application logic and underlying code structure.

schema-registryproxyconfluent-cloudrest-proxyrest

The-Alchemist/raspberrypi-blimp

Aug 2016 - Mar 2018

Contributions:15 commits, 1 PR, 14 pushes in 1 year 7 months

raspberry-piphatraspberryblimpraspberrypi

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