Rob Block
Staff Software Engineer Consultant at Upwork Freelancer
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRob Block is a Staff Software Engineer Consultant with over 15 years of experience designing and operating highly available, scalable cloud and middleware systems. He specializes in JVM-based backend architectures (Java, Spring, Tomcat) and large-scale storage and data pipelines, having led Ambry development at LinkedIn and contributed bug fixes and core improvements to the Ambry open-source object store. Rob has a strong track record of migrating and modernizing systems—zero-downtime metadata migrations, Azure-based disaster recovery, and breaking monoliths into modular services—while optimizing cost and multi-tenancy for SaaS platforms. He pairs deep systems expertise (databases, Kafka, Hadoop, NoSQL) with hands-on debugging of threading, memory, and performance issues to stabilize production services. As a mentor and technical lead, he’s driven team engineering practices and onboarding at scale, evidenced by enabling thousands of customer accounts post-migration. Based in Sunnyvale, he blends enterprise-grade architects’ rigor with a practitioner’s focus on measurable reliability and operational simplicity.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
M.S. Computer Science, M.S. Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignB.A. Physics Applied Math, B.A. Physics Applied Math at University of Chicago
Stackoverflow
11reputation
552reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (14)
javas10
debug10
object-storage10
back-end-development10
java10
microsoft-azure8
datastructures-algorithms8
azure8
algorithms8
algorithm8
data-structures8
data-structure8
linux6
gcc6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
linkedin/ambry
Jun 2018 - Mar 2021
Distributed object store
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:260 reviews, 77 commits, 172 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Rob's contributions focused on enhancing the core functionality and stability of the Ambry object store. They addressed replication bugs, specifically related to empty store scenarios, and optimized various aspects of the system. The user also implemented changes to the BlobId and added functionality for the processing of various blob types. They also touched upon supporting raw mode and incorporating various retries.
osgidistributed-systemsobject-storedistributed-object-storejava
lightningrob/ambry
Jun 2018 - Apr 2021
Distributed object store
Contributions:2 reviews, 2 PRs, 260 pushes in 2 years 9 months
distributed-systemsobject-storedistributed-object-storedistributed
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