Summary
Rory Crispin is a Principal Software Engineer based in London with 11 years of experience building observability and reliability platforms at scale. Currently leading observability efforts at ClickHouse, he progressed internally from SRE to senior and now principal engineering roles, reflecting deep domain expertise in large-scale telemetry and database performance. His background spans Kubernetes, Kafka, CockroachDB migrations, Istio, and multi-cloud infrastructure from roles at Thought Machine and StarLeaf, where he also optimized CI and async data pipelines. Rory combines hands-on systems development with pragmatic operational thinking—early work includes a concurrency-focused proxy and a cross-platform camera control startup built on Arduino. He also has a teaching streak, having tutored Python and electronics, and a hands-on engineering past maintaining a university rowing fleet, hinting at practical problem-solving beyond code.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Dr Challoners Grammar School
Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Nottingham
English