Reid Draper
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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RockstarReid Draper is a seasoned software engineering leader with 15 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, developer platforms, and AI-driven products. Currently Director of Engineering at Figma after growing their external developer platform and leading the team that built Figma’s AI Actions entry point, he combines hands-on backend expertise with strategic product delivery. His early career contributing to core open-source projects like Riak, bitcask, wai/warp, and Clojure’s test.check demonstrates deep systems-level knowledge across Erlang, Haskell, and functional programming. Reid is known for tackling concurrency, reliability, and testing challenges—improving production stability and developer workflows—and for growing engineering teams from small cores into high-impact organizations. Based in Chicago, he brings a rare mix of low-level technical rigor and product-facing leadership, and—perhaps unexpectedly—identifies as a self-proclaimed “mayonnaise connoisseur” reflecting a playful curiosity outside engineering.
15 years of coding experience
Github Skills (46)
property-based-testing10
gnu-make10
static-analysis10
erlang10
http-streaming10
web-application10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
api-design10
clojure-cli10
python10
nosql10
testing10
riak10
distributed-systems10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
basho/riak_core
Sep 2011 - Aug 2014
Distributed systems infrastructure used by Riak.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Reid primarily focused on improving the Riak core codebase by implementing helper functions for retrieving configuration values from properties and environment variables, and also merged refactored configuration value code. They addressed a concurrency issue in `riak_core_capability.erl` by calling `ring_trans` synchronously to ensure thread safety. Further work involved fixing a test in `hashtree.erl` to prevent timeouts and updating tools.mk files for dialyzer and xref operations.
distributed-systemsriak
clojure/test.check
Feb 2014 - Apr 2015
QuickCheck for Clojure
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:45 commits, 2 PRs, 5 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Reid primarily focused on enhancing the `test.check` library by implementing and refining testing-related features. Their contributions included updating the project version, fixing documentation typos, improving tests by allowing floating point numbers and speeding up keywords, and integrating ClojureScript support, including adapting the test definitions to the ClojureScript environment. Additionally, the user addressed a thread-safety issue and generally enhanced the library's test suite, indicating a focus on quality and maintainability.
clojurequickcheck
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