Parker Duckworth
Engineering Manager at Shopify
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolParker Duckworth is an engineering leader with 8 years of experience building and scaling cloud-native, distributed systems and vector databases. As Director of Engineering at Weaviate he grew and restructured the core team while driving major platform initiatives—like asynchronous replication, shard rebalancing, storage–compute separation, and multi-vector search—that power thousands of production AI search deployments. He pairs hands-on backend and DevOps chops (contributions to projects such as Ketch and Weaviate) with strong operational rigor, introducing observability standards, on-call rotations, QA simulation environments, and long-term planning processes. Parker’s background spans low-level database optimizations (RAM and disk improvements, memtable/WAL design) to product-facing API design, and he maintains high team satisfaction while increasing velocity and reliability. Based in Raleigh, he brings a pragmatic operator’s mindset shaped by prior roles leading real-time analytics, logistics platforms, and even military team leadership.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree, Engineering, Associate's degree, Engineering at Central Texas CollegeBachelor of Science - BSCS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BSCS, Computer Science at Baylor University
Spanish, Chinese
Stackoverflow
78reputation
5kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
kubernetes10
api-design10
testing10
go-testing10
go10
database-design10
kubernetes-pods10
command-line-interface9
command-line9
cli9
logging9
imp8
api8
cicd8
while-loop6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
weaviate/weaviate
Feb 2022 - Jan 2023
Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 releases, 863 reviews, 237 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Parker has primarily contributed to the Weaviate back-end, focusing on core functionality such as logging and the design of API. The commits showcase a deep understanding of data storage, with revisions to the way in which data is handled with properties. Additionally, the user worked on the API implementation, including request handling and ensuring consistency for various endpoints. The commits provide evidence for their involvement in database design and data structure handling for this vector database.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchsemantic-search-enginehnswfaultsimilarity-search
theketchio/ketch
Oct 2020 - Jan 2021
Ketch is an application delivery framework that facilitates the deployment and management of applications on Kubernetes using a simple command line interface
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:11 reviews, 25 commits, 10 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Parker contributed to the `ketch` project by adding checks for the existence of a pool before creating an application, ensuring the pool is valid. They also implemented a test case for an invalid pool scenario, improving the robustness of the application creation process. Furthermore, the user worked on the `pool_remove` command, adding functionality to remove the namespace associated with a pool and improving the tests by checking for resources before deletion.
golangdevelopment-toolsdevopsapplication-deliverycommand-line-interface
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.