Katie Hockman
Staff Software Engineer at Mercari, Inc.
Tokyo, Japan
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKatie Hockman is a Staff Software Engineer based in Tokyo with nine years of experience building secure, production-grade platform software in Go. She has led cross-organizational standardization and inner-source efforts at Mercari, driven code-scanning automation as a top OKR, and previously managed Datadog’s Go client libraries and trace agent while shaping OpenTelemetry adoption. At Google she worked on Go security and cryptography—shipping fixes for real CVEs, adding fuzzing and securing module distribution—and remains an active contributor to core Go projects like golang/go and golang/build. Comfortable switching between hands-on engineering and technical leadership, she combines a security-first mindset with deep backend and DevOps expertise and a track record of improving developer-facing libraries and release infrastructure.
8 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Miami UniversityStudy Abroad, Study Abroad at University of Leicester
Github Skills (40)
performance-monitor10
observability10
performance-analytics10
tls1210
openpgp10
code-profiling10
distributed-tracing10
http10
build-system10
tls1310
wpgraphql10
security10
mtls10
release-management10
go10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
DataDog/dd-trace-go
May 2022 - Jan 2023
Datadog Go Library including APM tracing, profiling, and security monitoring.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:6 releases, 442 reviews, 26 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Katie contributed to the Datadog Go library by enhancing the example code and adding support for tracing GraphQL operations. They focused on improving code examples for ease of use and expanding tracing capabilities for GraphQL functions using the gqlgen library. Additionally, the user refactored the code to remove unnecessary method parameters and addressed internal telemetry by supporting configurable heartbeat intervals to improve performance.
golangapmtracingdatadog-apmopentracing
DataDog/datadog-agent
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
Main repository for Datadog Agent
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:198 reviews, 17 commits, 56 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Katie primarily contributed to the Datadog Agent's backend functionality, focusing on the trace agent. They addressed serialization issues by reverting a change involving atomic operations in the trace package. Further contributions involved implementing a DogStatsD reverse proxy, including UDP and UDS implementations, to allow DogStatsD messages to be proxied through the Trace Agent over HTTP. The user also updated the CHANGELOG and migrated the project to a new cache library.
golangdatadog-agentagentobservabilitypmm
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