Rafael Lizarralde
Senior Software Engineer at X, the moonshot factory
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolRafael Lizarralde is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building reliable backend services and cloud infrastructure, currently working on grid-modernization tooling at X, the moonshot factory. He has strong site reliability and experimentation expertise from his time on Google Chat’s rollout systems and a background in backend search and infrastructure at Evernote. Rafael blends a quantitative engineering mindset with curiosity-driven side projects—authoring a popular Don't Starve mod that evolved through user-driven iteration, accessibility improvements, and performance optimizations. His academic work in intelligent tutoring systems and biosystems engineering informs a systems-thinking approach to problem discovery, prototyping, and long-term design. Based in Sunnyvale, he pairs hands-on coding and SRE practice with interests in ML, NLP, and climate action, often anticipating future requirements while keeping solutions practical and maintainable.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Climate Change: Learning for Action, Climate Change: Learning for Action at Terra.doSUNY Stony BrookUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstBachelor of Science, Biological/Biosystems Engineering, 3.865, Bachelor of Science, Biological/Biosystems Engineering, 3.865 at Cornell University
Spanish, Polish
Github Skills (20)
simulation10
search-engine10
java10
elasticsearch10
opensearch9
restful9
flutter9
minecraft8
sdk6
python5
sky4
evernote4
multiplayer-game3
react3
2d-game2
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
rezecib/Gesture-Wheel
Sep 2016 - Mar 2022
Contributions:16 releases, 26 commits, 24 pushes in 5 years 7 months
rezecib/Status-Announcements
Sep 2016 - Jun 2022
Mod for Don't Starve Together
Contributions:40 releases, 5 reviews, 124 commits in 5 years 9 months
mod
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