Owen Williams
Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolOwen Williams is a Principal Software Engineer with 19 years of experience building high-performance backend systems, currently helping Grafana Labs and previously shaping Google Search ranking pipelines in Go and C++. He focuses on data integrity, user privacy, and reducing operational toil by making production systems efficient, well-tested, and low-maintenance. Owen bridges feature and ranking teams to ensure data is permitted, correct, and disk-efficient, and has shipped ultra-low-latency C++ systems for flight search and high-throughput Go pipelines for search ranking. A lifelong open-source contributor and core maintainer of Mixxx, he also contributes to Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, including UTF-8 improvements to PromQL parsing. His background as a professional colorist and editor informs a strong attention to technical and creative detail, and he volunteers as a community leader and occasional Python teacher.
19 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BS Communication Arts, BS Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Github Skills (14)
parser10
go10
parsing10
parse10
promql10
utf10
testing10
metric9
monitoring9
alertview8
time-series8
alertifyjs8
alertdialog8
alerts8
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
prometheus/prometheus
Aug 2022 - Apr 2025
The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation EngineerContributions:79 reviews, 26 PRs, 101 pushes in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Owen contributed to the Prometheus monitoring system by implementing and testing features related to UTF-8 support in PromQL parsing. They modified the parser to correctly handle UTF-8 metric and label names. In addition, they added new test cases to ensure that various quoting methods for characters are handled correctly, and the feature for matching `__name__` multiple times is working. The user also fixed issues related to handling UTF-8 in label values and grouping configurations.
time-series-databaseprometheus-exporterseries-databasealertingdatabase
FireflyArtsCollective/ffagc
Aug 2016 - Jan 2023
Firefly Art Grant Core Website
Contributions:13 reviews, 547 commits, 48 PRs in 6 years 5 months
reactartrailsfireflygrant
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