Leighton Chen
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLeighton Chen is a Senior Software Engineer in New York with 11 years of experience building scalable backend systems and observability tooling. Currently at Microsoft, he has driven improvements in telemetry and reliability—contributing to major open-source projects like OpenTelemetry and the Azure SDK for Python, where he implemented metric types, retry logic, and Azure Monitor export features. His background spans full-stack work at companies such as Amazon, Toast, and startups, giving him strong API, cloud, and service-oriented architecture expertise. He has a practical focus on testability and resiliency—often adding local storage, AAD auth, and retry patterns to make telemetry robust in real-world networks. Colleagues rely on him to bridge product needs and developer ergonomics, delivering measurable improvements to monitoring and integrations.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
University of Waterloo
Github Skills (18)
observability10
python10
api-design10
azure-sdk10
testing10
microsoft-azure10
api10
sdk10
azure-monitor10
opentelemetry10
azure10
logging10
telemetry10
cicd9
documentation8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python
Sep 2019 - Jan 2023
OpenTelemetry Python API and SDK
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 releases, 1870 reviews, 181 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Leighton primarily contributed to the development of the metrics API within the opentelemetry-python repository. Their work focused on implementing new metric types such as counters, gauges, and measures, including their corresponding functionalities. The user was involved in refactoring the API, and integrating the metric's core functions. This includes several iterations of design, code changes, and documentation fixes.
apicorrelationcontextpythontracecontexttracing
census-instrumentation/opencensus-python
May 2019 - Jan 2023
A stats collection and distributed tracing framework
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:29 releases, 135 reviews, 181 commits in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Leighton primarily contributed to the implementation and testing of metrics export functionality to Azure Monitor. They developed a local storage solution, incorporated retry logic, and implemented AAD authentication support. Furthermore, the user implemented and tested various network-related statsbeat metrics, and added support for stamp-specific redirects.
tracingobservabilityloggingstatsdistributed-tracing
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