Patrick Shields
Staff Engineer at Stripe
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Shields is a Staff Engineer with 16 years of experience guiding teams and organizations through complex technical and product decisions, currently driving engineering impact at Stripe from Durham, NC. He blends hands-on problem solving—able to both lead company-wide initiatives and jump in to fix a broken build—with mentorship that builds autonomous, high-performing teams. Patrick focuses on incremental changes that unlock otherwise impossible problems and is comfortable collaborating across org boundaries and levels. An active back-end contributor, he’s improved CSV handling in the popular Databricks Spark CSV project, adding compression, quoting, and robust parsing that enhanced data processing at scale. Known for candid, empathetic feedback and pragmatic framing of ambiguity, he equips peers with the tools and context to succeed.
16 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Computer Science, BA, Computer Science at Vassar College
Github Skills (8)
scala10
apache-spark10
csv10
data-serialization10
csv-parser10
serialization10
testing8
hadoop6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
databricks/spark-csv
Mar 2015 - Apr 2015
CSV Data Source for Apache Spark 1.x
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 8 comments in 9 days
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to enhancing the CSV data source for Apache Spark. Their work included adding functionalities like compression codec support, enabling quoting on save, and integrating the Apache Commons CSVFormat library for more robust CSV parsing and writing. Furthermore, the user modified the existing code to accommodate escaping characters for better data handling and introduced new test cases to validate the new features. These modifications improved the data processing capabilities and the usability of the Spark CSV library.
data-sourcecsvcsv-readerparquetcsv-data
pashields/circletests
Aug 2018 - Jul 2021
Contributions:1 release, 12 PRs, 49 pushes in 2 years 11 months
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