Roman Kennke
Principal Engineer at Amazon
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRoman Kennke is a Principal Engineer with 18 years specializing in JVM internals and low-level performance work, currently leading Project Lilliput at Amazon to shrink Java application memory footprints. He was the lead author of the Shenandoah concurrent, low-pause garbage collector at Red Hat and has a long track record contributing significant GC and JVM optimizations to the OpenJDK mainline. Roman blends deep systems-level expertise—atomic operations, object layout and memory barriers—with pragmatic product delivery across enterprises from Sun/Oracle to JP Morgan and Datadog. Based in Zurich, he is known for turning research-grade JVM innovations into production-ready improvements that materially boost scalability and latency. An oft-overlooked strength is his sustained ability to shepherd collaborative, community-driven engineering in OpenJDK while driving corporate projects end-to-end.
18 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma Computer Science, Diploma Computer Science at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences
English
Github Skills (16)
memory-management10
openjdk10
javas10
g10
c-language10
jvm10
cprogramming-language10
garbage10
java10
collector10
garbage-collection10
concurrency9
s390x5
ppc64le5
risc-v5
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
openjdk/jdk
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
JDK main-line development https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:675 reviews, 81 commits, 139 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Roman made substantial contributions to the OpenJDK project, specifically focused on the implementation and optimization of garbage collection (GC) mechanisms within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The commits demonstrate a deep understanding of memory management and low-level code optimization, including working with object headers and memory barriers. The user's work included improvements to atomic operations and memory layout, as well as the adaptation of existing GC code to facilitate more efficient use of multi-core processing.
openjdkjavajvmjdk
openjdk/lilliput
May 2021 - Jan 2023
https://openjdk.org/projects/lilliput
Contributions:128 reviews, 41 commits, 146 PRs in 1 year 8 months
openjdkjavasdk
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