Ryan Simmen
Staff Software Engineer at GitHub
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Simmen is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building and operating large-scale, cloud-native infrastructure, currently at GitHub in Raleigh. He specializes in Kubernetes orchestration, GitOps-driven CI/CD with Helm and Kustomize, service mesh and Envoy, and distributed tracing for observability, pairing deep systems expertise with practical CloudOps automation. A polyglot engineer fluent in Go, .NET Core, Python, Java, JavaScript and C++, he has contributed to high-profile open-source projects like git-lfs (implementing chunked transfer support) and improved test automation for GitHub Enterprise backup utilities. His background spans senior roles at Microsoft and ChannelAdvisor and emphasizes performance, scalability, security and compliance across complex distributed systems. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architecture decisions that balance operational resilience with developer velocity.
10 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Github Skills (15)
testing10
git10
backup10
bash10
go10
go-testing10
git-lfs10
scripting9
shell9
script9
sh9
http9
api-design8
go-modules7
command-line-interface7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
github/backup-utils
Mar 2020 - Nov 2020
GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 27 commits, 9 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily focused on writing and modifying test scripts for the `github/backup-utils` repository. Their contributions involved fixing existing tests related to SSH key detection and the `ghe-restore` functionality. The user also added new tests for parallel execution of `ghe-restore` and made adjustments to ensure the tests could run correctly without requiring specific dependencies like `moreutils` or `gawk`. These changes aimed to improve the reliability and robustness of the backup and restore utilities.
backupsbackuprestoreenterprise
git-lfs/git-lfs
Jun 2015 - Aug 2015
Git extension for versioning large files
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 13 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the Git LFS project by implementing features related to handling file transfers, specifically focusing on chunked transfer encoding and extension support. They wrote and modified Go code to support chunked transfer, including updates to the server-side handling of file uploads and batch requests. Additionally, they added and modified tests to ensure the correct behavior of these new functionalities, demonstrating proficiency in Go and Git LFS's internal workings.
git-extensionversion-controllibgit2git-addonsversioning
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