Riley Karson
Software Engineer at Google
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRiley Karson is a seasoned software engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in Google Cloud Platform and Terraform, currently building infrastructure at Google from Seattle. He has a strong track record contributing to high-profile open-source projects like HashiCorp Terraform and GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules, adding provider features, tests, and clearer Terraform documentation that improve GCP support for many users. Riley’s work spans backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling—he’s implemented health-check fixes, CORS support, and import/refactor changes that make cloud resources more reliable and easier to manage. Early startup and mobile experience, plus internships at Microsoft and Bank of Canada, give him pragmatic product sensibilities alongside deep systems expertise. Notably, he has experience generating code and integrating gRPC clients into tooling, reflecting an ability to bridge low-level APIs and higher-level infrastructure automation.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computing (Honours), Computer Science, Bachelor of Computing (Honours), Computer Science at Queen's University
French, English
Github Skills (22)
google-cloud-platform10
cloud-computing10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
testing10
cloud-infrastructure10
terraform10
gcp10
terraformer10
go10
api10
infrastructure-as-code10
go-testing9
documentation9
cloud-manager8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules
Aug 2018 - Jan 2023
Add Google Cloud Platform support to Terraform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2842 reviews, 1498 commits, 1892 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Riley primarily contributed to improving and maintaining the documentation of the Terraform configuration files within the `googlecloudplatform/magic-modules` repository. They addressed documentation issues, particularly regarding the usage of the hyphen character and the inclusion of configuration examples. In addition, they added test cases, added support for new features to existing and new GCP resources (SslCertificate, Cloud Functions and BigQuery Dataset). The code changes focused on Terraform-related documentation and the implementation of new features.
golanggcpappenginegooglecloudgooglecloudplatform
hashicorp/terraform-provider-google
May 2017 - Jan 2023
Terraform Provider for Google Cloud Platform
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 227 reviews, 499 commits in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Riley contributed to the Google Cloud Terraform provider, specifically addressing default values for HTTP and HTTPS health checks. They implemented an example for Google Cloud content-based load balancing and refactored tests for Google Storage buckets. Additional contributions included adding import support and refactoring code to support google_sql_user. The user also made changes related to the Google Compute target pool and updated several health check tests.
providergoogle-cloud-platformcloud-platformgoogle-cloudterraform
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