Kelly Mclaughlin
Principal Software Engineer at Fastly
Thornton, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKelly Mclaughlin is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years building high-performance distributed systems and object stores, currently driving architectural work at Fastly. He brings deep expertise in functional languages (Rust, Haskell, Erlang) alongside C, C++, and Java, and focuses on performance, scalability, operability, property-based testing, and strong team dynamics. His career includes leading the initial development of Riak CS at Basho and improving Manta object storage at Joyent, demonstrating a track record of shipping production-grade storage and infrastructure. An active open-source contributor, Kelly has improved core Erlang tooling and distributed components—contributions include work on riak_core, rebar3, and the webmachine framework. He favors pragmatic, tradeoff-aware solutions and mentors teams to balance thoroughness with delivery. Based in Thornton, Colorado, he pairs graduate-level training in computer science with hands-on systems engineering across startups and platform companies.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityB.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
English
Stackoverflow
31reputation
900reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (37)
dependency-manager10
unit-testing10
dependency-management10
performance-monitor10
performance-analytics10
key-value-store10
erlang10
back-end-development10
eunit10
dependency-analysis10
testing10
riak10
leveldb10
distributed-systems10
database-testing10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
basho/riak_core
Feb 2011 - Jun 2014
Distributed systems infrastructure used by Riak.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:62 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Kelly primarily contributed to the core Riak core project, making various changes to improve the system's stability and efficiency. Their work involved refactoring and enhancing the ring management processes, particularly the handling of node departures and handoffs within the cluster. The user also added unit tests to ensure code quality and maintainability, and improved exception handling. This user's work suggests a strong understanding of distributed systems and the Erlang ecosystem.
erlanginfrastructureinfrastructure-systemskubernetesdistributed-systems
basho/riak_kv
Feb 2011 - May 2014
Riak Key/Value Store
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:172 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Kelly primarily focused on improving the Riak Key/Value Store's backend functionality. Their contributions included removing console-related features from the riak-admin script and refining various functions within the core codebase. They also addressed potential atom leaks and improved error handling, particularly in put and delete functionalities, and incorporated unit tests. The changes also included the implementation of bucket type hashes for typed buckets.
javakey-valueriakkey-value-store
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