Kihwal Lee
Chief Mad Scientist at Duleir Technology
Champaign, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKihwal Lee is a seasoned systems engineer and open-source leader with 13+ years building reliable, high-performance infrastructure and distributed storage systems. As an Apache Hadoop committer and longtime contributor to core HDFS functionality, he has driven improvements in block management, concurrent appends, snapshots, and Kerberos security across one of the most widely used big-data platforms. His career spans research-grade kernel and real-time systems work through production roles at Yahoo and Motorola, and he now leads engineering as Chief Mad Scientist at Duleir Technology. Kihwal combines deep Linux kernel and VMM debugging skills with practical system design for robustness and recoverability, making him effective at hard-to-debug, security-sensitive problems. Based in Champaign, IL, he pairs a PhD-level research background with hands-on operational experience and is an Extra Class amateur radio operator—reflecting a longstanding curiosity about communications and low-level systems.
13 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
BS, BS at Southern Illinois University, CarbondaleUniversity of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignYonsei University
Github Skills (12)
security10
data-storage10
javas10
hdfs10
rpc10
distributed-systems10
kerberos10
java10
apache-hadoop10
filesystem9
debug8
debugging8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/hadoop
Jan 2013 - Sep 2021
Apache Hadoop
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 827 commits, 4 PRs in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Kihwal primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the Apache Hadoop project, focusing on enhancements to core HDFS functionality. Their work included implementing features like improved block management, handling of concurrent appends, optimizing performance, and adding new functionalities related to data integrity. They also addressed several security issues, including vulnerabilities in webhdfs and RPC, and made contributions to improve Kerberos authentication.
apachebig-datasparkhadoopjava
apache/hadoop-common
Nov 2013 - Jul 2014
Mirror of Apache Hadoop common
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Kihwal contributed to the Hadoop-common repository by addressing multiple bug fixes related to rolling upgrades, lease recovery, and file handling within the HDFS system. The commits involve modifications to core components like `FSNamesystem`, `FSImage`, and `DFSAdmin`, indicating a focus on improving the stability and functionality of the distributed file system. Several commits also address snapshot-related issues, showing the user's involvement in enhancing the snapshot features. The contributions highlight the user's involvement in critical areas of the Hadoop Distributed File System.
apachebig-datanetwork-serverhadoopjava
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