Nathan Baker
Staff Engineer at Datadog
Cary, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Baker is a Staff Engineer with 11+ years designing and shipping fault-tolerant, storage- and OS-focused systems, now driving platform work at Datadog after a technical leadership stint at Sysdig. He specializes in distributed systems, kernel/user-space interactions, and resilient agent architectures, having led critical features like dynamic filtering, FIPS compliance, and a secure profiling baseliner used for ML/policy work. His open-source contributions to sysdig and falcosecurity show deep practical experience with eBPF, kernel modules, and libsinsp/libscap internals, while small-scope work on projects like Naev reveals a knack for polishing user-facing details. Nathan is equally comfortable fixing flaky CI/CD pipelines and designing multi-threaded metrics pipelines, and he has a track record of rescuing high-profile customer escalations to preserve large ARR accounts. Based in Cary, NC, he combines systems-level rigor from NetApp and Lenovo-era firmware/Chrome OS work with hands-on build and DevOps expertise. Colleagues describe him as pragmatic: he writes code that usually works, and when it doesn't he knows how to make it.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Virginia Tech
English
Stackoverflow
1,248reputation
136kreached
7answers
23questions
Github Skills (36)
docker10
lib10
cap10
scripting10
ebpf10
code-library10
c1110
dockers10
doc10
c1710
kernel10
lua10
script10
kernel-mode10
sh10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
draios/sysdig
Oct 2018 - Dec 2020
Linux system exploration and troubleshooting tool with first class support for containers
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:23 reviews, 46 commits, 70 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nathan made significant contributions to the `sysdig` project, primarily focused on improving the build process and kernel interactions. They implemented a builder for the eBPF probe, including Dockerfiles and build scripts. The user also addressed build issues on Debian-based distributions and made modifications to the kernel driver, handling changes in syscall arguments and time structures related to Linux kernel updates and addressing security concerns.
containerstroubleshootingseccomplinuxdocker
falcosecurity/libs
Jul 2022 - Oct 2022
libsinsp, libscap, the kernel module driver, and the eBPF driver sources
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 6 commits, 6 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily focused on enhancing the `libscap` and `libsinsp` libraries, as evidenced by their commit messages and code changes. Their work included adding a new return code, `SCAP_FILTERED_EVENT`, to improve event filtering behavior. This involved modifying header files and core library logic. They also addressed code quality through removal of unnecessary null checks.
kernelbpflibsinspebpflinux
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