Richard Larocque
Distinguished Engineer at Outreach.io
North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Larocque is a Distinguished Engineer with 11 years of experience building resilient backend systems across startups and FAANG, currently based in North Vancouver. He helped scale Outreach from Series A to unicorn, architecting durable outbox CDC, real-time activity feeds, and becoming an in-house expert in Rails, MySQL/Postgres, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Kubernetes. Earlier roles at Google and NVIDIA honed his ability to design for extreme scale and reliability—he contributed a sequence CRDT for ordered lists and production pipelines for high-volume telemetry. Richard is an active backend engineer in the open-source community, notably enhancing elliptic-curve key handling in the widely used ruby-jwt project. He writes clear, blog-style engineering docs to spread knowledge and thinks end-to-end from business requirements down to hardware constraints. Pragmatic and curious, he combines deep systems-level understanding with a bias for readable, maintainable code.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor, Software Engineering, Bachelor, Software Engineering at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (8)
crypto10
ec10
elliptic-curve-cryptography10
openssl10
jwt10
ruby10
base64-encoding9
testing8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
jwt/ruby-jwt
Sep 2020 - Nov 2020
A ruby implementation of the RFC 7519 OAuth JSON Web Token (JWT) standard.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 5 commits, 3 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the implementation and modification of the `JWT::JWK::EC` class, which is crucial for handling Elliptic Curve cryptography within the ruby-jwt library. Their work included adding support for custom "kid" values, enabling private key export, and refining error handling for unsupported curves. These changes involved modifying existing code, adding new functionality, and updating the related test suite. The user also rebased and extended the `KeyBase` class, supporting new conventions for the project.
ruby-jwttokenauthenticationjson-web-tokenruby
getoutreach/Viewpoint
Nov 2017 - Nov 2019
A Ruby client access library for Microsoft Exchange Web Services (EWS)
Contributions:2 PRs, 1 push, 1 comment in 2 years
exchangemicrosoft-exchangeruby-clientrubyweb-services
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