Matt Jacobs
Staff Software Engineer at Stripe
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Jacobs is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience designing and shipping resilient distributed systems from startups to large-scale platforms. Based in San Jose, he currently helps architect reliability and fault-tolerance at Stripe after leading resilience engineering at Gremlin and operating edge APIs at Netflix. A long-time open-source contributor, Matt made substantive core improvements to RxJava and maintained Netflix’s Hystrix—work that reflects deep expertise in backpressure, exception handling, and runtime isolation patterns. He blends hands-on systems programming with pragmatic operational judgment, routinely turning subtle failure modes into test-covered fixes. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful refactors and for making complex async systems measurably more robust.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Duke UniversityMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Stackoverflow
23reputation
2kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (24)
rxjavafx10
java10
scala10
javas10
rxjava10
hystrix10
concurrency10
multithreading9
backpressure9
hyper-threading9
functional-programming9
thread9
threaded9
unit-testing8
testing8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
Netflix/Hystrix
Sep 2013 - Jul 2017
Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:51 releases, 587 commits, 879 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily focused on improving the Hystrix library's core functionality by addressing bugs and enhancing its capabilities. Their contributions include fixing issues related to exception handling in `HystrixBadRequestException`, resolving logic errors in the `ExceptionThreadingUtility`, and adding new constructors for common command setups. Additionally, they implemented an `onUnsubscribe` hook and refactored threadpool creation logic. The user also contributed to the metrics event stream for client disconnection handling and CodaHale metrics.
distributed-systemsfault-tolerancehystrix
ReactiveX/RxJava
Apr 2013 - Aug 2014
RxJava – Reactive Extensions for the JVM – a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences for the Java VM.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 2 comments, 1 issue in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Matt contributed significantly to the core logic of the RxJava library, making typesafe improvements to the rxjava-core module. Their work involved refactoring existing code and resolving conflicts, primarily in the Observable class, to enhance its functionality. Furthermore, the user modified the Scala adaptor to use implicits within RxImplicits, optimizing it. The user also added tests to cover edge cases, and implemented backpressure handling, ensuring better performance.
asynchronousjavajvmreactive-extensionsrxjava
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