Madelyn Olson
Member Of Technical Steering Committee at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMadelyn Olson is a Principal Software Engineer and member of the Valkey Technical Steering Committee with eight years of experience building scalable, distributed in-memory systems. Based in Seattle, she leads open source initiatives for Amazon ElastiCache and MemoryDB, focusing on data-path scalability, security hardening, and platform-level reliability. As a long-time contributor and maintainer of Valkey and a contributor to high-profile projects like Redis and KeyDB, she specializes in replication, authentication, and fixing subtle correctness and performance bugs. Madelyn combines deep systems-level C/C++ backend work with community stewardship, having implemented ACL selectors and key-based permissions in Valkey. She’s equally comfortable debugging server panics as she is shaping project governance and developer tooling. Outside work she notes an affinity for fractals, hinting at a preference for elegant, recursive solutions to hard engineering problems.
8 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Github Skills (27)
debug10
key-value-store10
back-end-development10
redis10
acl10
databases10
c1110
c1710
access-control-list10
performance-optimization10
replication10
database10
testing9
lua9
cluster-api8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
valkey-io/valkey
Mar 2024 - Apr 2025
A flexible distributed key-value datastore that is optimized for caching and other realtime workloads.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 1328 reviews, 340 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Madelyn primarily contributed to the Valkey distributed key-value datastore's core functionality by addressing replication and authentication issues, fixing server panics, and improving the redis-benchmark utility. Their work included bug fixes related to data integrity, such as a rounding error in the geo.tcl tests and fixes to command handling. The commits show improvements in the ACL subsystem by implementing selectors and key-based permissions, which enhance security and control over data access.
cachedatabasekey-valuekey-value-storenosql
redis/redis
Jun 2018 - Dec 2022
Redis is an in-memory database that persists on disk. The data model is key-value, but many different kind of values are supported: Strings, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Streams, HyperLogLogs, Bitmaps.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2116 reviews, 143 commits, 476 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Madelyn primarily focused on bug fixes and performance improvements within the Redis codebase. Their commits addressed issues related to replication, including handling whitespace in passwords for authentication and improving disk I/O during diskless loading. Additionally, they made changes to the core server code for better stability and implemented features like preventing cross slot operations within scripts and functions by default. The user also contributed to improving the accuracy of performance metrics within redis-benchmark.
memorystreamsin-memory-databasememory-databasedata-model
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