Richard Boulton
Engineering Manager at Cloudflare
South Cambridgeshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Boulton is an experienced engineering manager with 26 years of hands-on expertise in back-end systems, internet security, HTTP protocols, search technology and information retrieval. Currently leading engineering at Cloudflare, he previously headed backend development at the UK Government Digital Service, bringing public-sector scale and resilience to content and search platforms. He combines leadership with deep technical contributions to prominent open-source projects—such as improving HTTP handling in the widely used requests library and extending the Xapian search core—demonstrating both systems design and low-level debugging skills. His work on testing infrastructure for Hypothesis and stemming algorithms for Snowball shows a pragmatic focus on reliability and language-aware search. Trained in mathematics and computer science at Cambridge, he pairs rigorous analytical thinking with a long history of consulting and product development across startups and government. Colleagues describe him as a builder who prioritises diverse teams and practical solutions that make information easier to find and systems safer.
26 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
MA, Mathematics, MA, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (36)
algorithm10
library-design10
property-based-testing10
algorithms10
c-language10
lib10
pytest10
python10
apidoc10
testing10
http10
build-system10
code-library10
c1110
indexing10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
xapian/xapian
Sep 1999 - Nov 2015
Mirror of the Xapian repository. You're welcome to open pull requests on github (they'll just get merged indirectly).
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3897 commits, 1 PR, 65 pushes in 16 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Richard's contributions primarily involve bug fixes and the addition of features to Xapian's core codebase. The user addressed issues related to data storage and processing, and implemented new query operators, showing an understanding of the project's data structures and algorithmic design. Contributions demonstrate expertise in extending the library's functionality and improving its reliability, aligning with backend development responsibilities.
mergedpull-requestsxapianwelcome
snowballstem/snowball
Mar 2003 - Dec 2014
Snowball compiler and stemming algorithms
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:135 commits in 11 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the Snowball stemming algorithms and compiler. Their work included refactoring the build system, moving algorithms into subdirectories, and integrating new stemming algorithms like "lovins" and "german2". They also added features like the ability to get the length of a stemmed word and a listing of available stemmers, and updated the example to include language selection. They also worked on adding character encoding support and implemented C++ compatibility, and also refactored the Java interface.
compilersnowballstemming
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