Martijn Vels
Staff Software Engineer - Fleet Efficiency at Google
Town of Eastchester, New York, United States
Summary
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RockstarMartijn Vels is a Staff Software Engineer at Google specializing in fleet efficiency with a long history of low-level systems and backend engineering spanning over two decades. He brings deep expertise in C, C++, C#, .NET and database systems from early research and engineering roles through senior positions at Bloomberg and multiple roles at Google. Martijn is an active contributor to high-profile open-source C++ projects like Protocol Buffers and Abseil, where his work improving absl::Cord and stream implementations focused on performance, memory safety, and platform-specific optimizations. He combines systems-design instincts with hands-on optimization—tuning serialization and memory behavior to squeeze latency and resource gains at scale. Based in Eastchester, NY, he pairs veteran architectural judgment with continued practical contributions to foundational libraries that underpin modern distributed systems.
6 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (17)
algorithm10
algorithms10
c-language10
protocol-buffers10
memory-management10
data-serialization10
abseil10
data-structure10
serialization10
performance-optimization10
data-structures10
cprogramming-language10
datastructures-algorithms9
threaded8
multithreading8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
protocolbuffers/protobuf
Nov 2022 - Jan 2023
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 commits, 4 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Martijn's commits primarily involve implementing and optimizing low-level functionalities within the Protocol Buffers library. They focused on enhancing the `ZeroCopyInputStream` and `CodedInputStream` classes, including the addition of `ReadCord()` and `WriteCord()` methods for direct handling of `absl::Cord` data, and optimizations for existing stream implementations. Furthermore, they improved arena cleanup and added explicit constructors. This work contributes to improved performance and efficiency in handling data serialization and deserialization within the protobuf library.
protocol-buffersrpcgoogle-protocol-buffersinterchange-formatmarshalling
abseil/abseil-cpp
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
Abseil Common Libraries (C++)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Martijn primarily focused on enhancing the `absl::Cord` class within the Abseil library. Their contributions included implementing the `GetCustomAppendBuffer` method, which provides flexibility in buffer allocation. Subsequent commits refined internal aspects of `Cord`, including layout adjustments and the addition of a prefetch API, aimed at improving performance on specific hardware (ARM). Further commits addressed memory safety concerns via sanitization and optimizations.
cpp
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