Nikita Salnikov-tarnovski
Senior Principal Software Engineer, Common Platform
Tartu, Tartu maakond, Estonia
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikita Salnikov-tarnovski is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 20 years of experience building high-throughput, observable systems and leading cross-functional product teams. Based in Tartu, Estonia, he has held technical leadership roles from startup CTO and founder at Plumbr—scaling observability to billions of messages a day—to principal engineering roles at Splunk where he now shapes common platform initiatives. A pragmatic solution architect and hands-on JVM tuner, he moves fluidly between product leadership and low-level performance work. Nikita is an active OpenTelemetry contributor and maintainer, improving Java auto-instrumentation and tracing semantics to make distributed tracing more reliable and less noisy. He pairs an MSc in Algebra with deep production experience, a combination that surfaces in clean, mathematically minded approaches to system design and observability. Colleagues rely on him for turning hard distributed-systems problems into maintainable, well-instrumented solutions.
19 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Pähklimäe GümnaasiumMSc Algebra, MSc Algebra at University of Tartu
English, Russian, Estonian
Stackoverflow
5,756reputation
1.7mreached
141answers
33questions
java
top-5%
memory-leaks
top-5%
spring-boot
top-5%
spring
top-5%
Github Skills (23)
propagation10
tracer10
annotations10
testing10
java10
annotation-processing10
javas10
opentelemetry10
trace10
api-design9
memory-leaks9
spring9
build-automation9
spring-boot9
gradle9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation
Nov 2020 - Oct 2021
OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation and instrumentation libraries for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 1849 reviews, 3 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Nikita primarily contributed to auto-instrumentation libraries for Java, focusing on supporting various third-party tracing annotations and configuration properties. They implemented support for new annotations, such as `@WithSpan`, and created test cases to verify the correct context propagation in concurrent scenarios. Additionally, the user improved the project's build process and incorporated code to handle the correct version number in the Java Agent, and ensured compliance with the OpenTelemetry specification for HTTP spans.
instrumentationinstrumentation-librariesjava-agenttracingauto-instrumentation
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java
Apr 2020 - Jun 2021
OpenTelemetry Java SDK
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:146 reviews, 22 commits, 27 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Nikita primarily contributed to the OpenTelemetry Java SDK by enhancing its functionality and maintainability. Their work included adding and modifying annotations for auto-instrumentation, specifically the `WithSpan` annotation, making the "value" attribute optional. They also introduced improvements for setting semantic attributes within the Span.Builder, and implemented features to handle message related attributes, enhancing support for messaging systems. Finally, they addressed the handling and preventing of overly verbose logging related to trace propagators.
tracingobservabilitysdkotelopentelemetry-java
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