Rohan Desai
Co-Founder at Responsive
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRohan Desai is a systems-focused software engineer and Co-Founder based in San Francisco with eight years of professional experience building storage and distributed systems. He spent five years at Confluent contributing to core Kafka and KSQL reliability and performance—work that included fixing producer behavior, preventing thread leaks, improving metrics, and hardening schema/serialization paths. Earlier roles at Yahoo! and Bracket involved designing and shipping large-scale object storage, recovery, and migration frameworks, and he served as a scrum master on critical storage efforts. Now leading Responsive, he combines deep systems programming expertise with product instincts to turn low-level performance work into reliable, production-ready services. Notably, his open-source contributions touch high-profile projects like Apache Kafka and Confluent’s ecosystem, demonstrating a pattern of improving robustness and observability in streaming platforms.
8 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Github Skills (20)
avro10
testing10
kafka10
data-serialization10
kafka-streams10
java10
serialization10
deserialization10
javas10
streams-api10
error-handling10
apache-kafka10
schema10
scala9
schema-changes9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
apache/kafka
Jan 2018 - Dec 2022
Mirror of Apache Kafka
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 17 commits, 17 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Rohan primarily focused on enhancing the Apache Kafka project's core functionality. Their contributions involved addressing shutdown procedures for StreamThreads, ensuring proper resource management, and adding tests to validate correct behavior. They also worked on optimizing the producer's behavior, including resetting the batch expiry time. Additionally, the user implemented improvements to the log4j kafka appender, allowing configuration of SASL settings.
apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka
confluentinc/ksql
Dec 2017 - Sep 2022
The database purpose-built for stream processing applications.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 259 reviews, 387 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Rohan primarily contributed to the KSQL engine by implementing informative error messages, and adding tests for them. They also worked on producer thread leaks by closing query metadata objects. Furthermore, the user focused on resolving performance issues, by handling joins and building out functionalities like rekeying. Additionally, the user contributed to fixing code generation issues for different data types and implemented new metrics to track performance.
materialized-viewsstream-processingstreaming-queriesksqldbsql
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