Sam Kimbrel
Staff Software Engineer at Figma
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Kimbrel is a staff software engineer and pragmatic technical leader with 15 years’ experience designing scalable distributed systems and data storage solutions, currently building at Figma after leading major platform work at Twilio. He’s known for driving large architectural refactors that materially reduced incidents and costs—one migration at Twilio projected $600k/year in COGS savings while improving stability amid 400% product growth. Sam combines hands-on backend engineering across many languages (notably contributions to multiple official Twilio helper libraries and the popular flask-restful project) with clear engineering standards and inclusive team practices. He prioritizes ethical product choices and workplace diversity, refusing roles that rely on exploitative ad- or data-driven business models. Comfortable both mentoring and shipping, he has a track record of turning messy legacy systems into robust, testable platforms and lifting teammates into leadership. Based in Los Angeles, he describes himself simply as a human building software with other humans for the benefit of humans.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
English, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (36)
api-rest10
tml10
javascript10
url-encoding10
python10
back-end-development10
api-design10
apidoc10
restful-api10
package-development10
twilio-api10
net10
dotnet10
url-scheme10
url-validation10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
twilio/twilio-java
Jul 2013 - Jul 2015
A Java library for communicating with the Twilio REST API and generating TwiML.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:199 commits, 22 PRs, 61 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the Java backend of the Twilio library. Their work included supporting UTF-8 character set responses, implementing and fixing aspects of account and call resources, and updating the codebase by implementing parameters into request objects. The user also made version bumps and added deletion/redaction support. Furthermore, the user's commits involved API updates.
sms-messagesmhealthtelephonymmsvideo
twilio/twilio-python
Aug 2013 - Jun 2015
A Python module for communicating with the Twilio API and generating TwiML.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:154 commits, 11 PRs, 22 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the maintenance and improvement of the `twilio-python` library. Their work focused on ensuring compatibility with older Python versions (3.2 and 2.5) by modifying unicode literals and format-string usage. Furthermore, the user updated the library's user agent string and implemented support for sequence types in form data, and added Message and Media resources.
apipythontwimltwiliopython-module
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