Nathan Harmata
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Harmata is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and tech lead based in New York with 14 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems at Google. He has driven the architecture and delivery of Google's build system (now open-sourced as Bazel), focusing on distributed graph processing, performance, memory optimization, and correctness. A hands-on back-end engineer, Nathan has made notable open-source contributions to high-profile projects like Bazel and Google Guava, refactoring internals to reduce memory usage and parallelize workloads. He is skilled at turning complex edge cases into robust solutions—evidenced by bug fixes and query-performance improvements in Bazel’s core. As a leader he balances deep technical ownership with team coaching, having been a tech lead since 2019. Trained at Carnegie Mellon in computer science, he brings a platform-minded approach to developer tooling and large-scale infrastructure.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (15)
javas10
algorithms10
build-system10
performance-optimization10
bazel10
guava10
java10
concurrency10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
memory-management9
debugging8
unit-testing8
multithreading8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
bazelbuild/bazel
Feb 2015 - Jan 2023
a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 reviews, 596 commits, 13 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Nathan made significant contributions by refactoring and improving the globbing logic within the Bazel build system. These changes involved restructuring code to optimize memory usage, parallelizing processing, and ensuring that the 'tests' query function produced unique results, improving overall query performance. The user also addressed several bugs related to edge cases with the `rdeps` query and `buildfiles` operator. The changes demonstrate the user's expertise in the internals of the Bazel build system and their ability to optimize for performance, correctness, and memory usage.
build-systembazelcorrectscalablemulti-language
google/guava
Jul 2015 - Apr 2017
Google core libraries for Java
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 comment in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the core Java libraries within the Guava project. Their work involved optimizing and refactoring existing code, specifically related to pre-sizing data structures for improved performance. They implemented memory optimizations for the internal data structures. Further contributions include the introduction of a builder class, InternerBuilder, for the Interner implementation.
javaguava
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