Paul Gier
Software Engineer at DataStax
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Gier is a seasoned software engineer with 19 years of experience, currently building cloud-native systems at DataStax from his base in Austin. He has deep expertise in monitoring and observability, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Prometheus, Alertmanager, and the OpenShift monitoring stack where he upgraded components, fixed service discovery and hardening issues, and tuned deployment manifests. At Red Hat he focused on Java server internals and DevOps automation, contributing bug fixes and refactors to WildFly and Prometheus Operator that improved robustness and simplified operator logic. Paul blends backend systems programming in Go and Java with practical DevOps tooling—CI/CD, Ansible, and Kubernetes—so he’s comfortable across code, config, and infrastructure. He also has a background in testing and automation for distributed systems (Apache Pulsar) and Maven dependency management, reflecting a knack for improving build and runtime reliability. Trained originally in biomedical engineering and later holding an MS in computer science, he brings a methodical, systems-driven approach to observability and platform engineering.
19 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at Nova Southeastern UniversityBachelor's degree, Biomedical/Medical Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Biomedical/Medical Engineering at Marquette University
Github Skills (80)
dependency-management10
messaging10
testing10
alertdialog10
command-line-interface10
maven-plugin10
bash10
javas10
system10
openshift-origin10
build-automation10
maven10
systemd10
ansible-galaxy10
operator10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
prometheus/procfs
Dec 2018 - Apr 2022
procfs provides functions to retrieve system, kernel and process metrics from the pseudo-filesystem proc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 reviews, 72 commits, 120 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the `procfs` project by implementing functionality to parse system metrics from the `/proc` filesystem. Their work included adding support for reading and parsing data from `/proc/diskstats` and `/sys/block/<device>/stat` files, involving the creation of new structures and test cases. Additionally, the user fixed a typo and refactored the code into more self-contained packages and improved error handling. These changes contribute to Prometheus's ability to collect and expose system metrics.
kernelrustprocproc-filesystemfilesystem
openshift/cluster-monitoring-operator
Nov 2018 - Jun 2020
Manage the OpenShift monitoring stack
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:66 commits, 39 PRs, 129 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Paul's commits primarily focused on updating and maintaining the cluster monitoring operator, specifically dealing with image versions and the deployment configurations. Their contributions included updating image versions for components such as Prometheus, Alertmanager, and node exporter. Additionally, they implemented changes for the PrometheusRule validation webhook, incorporated operator TLS configuration, and removed config-reloader limits. The user also addressed cleaning up resources like Thanos Ruler components.
monitoringkubernetesgrafanaopenshift
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