Scott Kidder
Engineering Manager at Discord
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolScott Kidder is an engineering leader with 15+ years building high-performance media infrastructure and 11 years of hands-on experience scaling video and image platforms for billions of daily requests. Currently leading Discord’s Media Infrastructure team in San Francisco, he drives format modernization (WebP/AVIF), lifecycle storage, and CDN cost reduction while balancing content safety and product collaboration. Previously at Mux he grew teams and systems that process terabytes of streaming data and billions of logs, built Kafka-based pipelines with sub-minute latency, and cut cloud costs through infrastructure and storage redesigns. His background spans deep systems work from DRM and CDN strategies to real-time anomaly detection using Apache Flink, and he contributed bug fixes and assignment strategies to high-profile open-source projects like Apache Flink and the Go Kafka library Sarama. Known for combining hands-on backend engineering with pragmatic people leadership, he focuses on operational simplicity and measurable KPIs. Based in the Bay Area with a CS&E degree from UC Davis, he blends startup grit with large-scale production experience.
11 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science & Engineering, B.S., Computer Science & Engineering at University of California, Davis
Github Skills (18)
amazon-kinesis10
apache-flink10
big-data10
kafka10
flink-sql10
partitioning10
kin10
kafka-node10
java10
javas10
go10
aws10
kafkajs10
apache-kafka10
concurrency10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
apache/flink
Jul 2016 - May 2019
Apache Flink
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 7 PRs, 9 comments in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Scott primarily contributed to the Apache Flink codebase by implementing features and fixing bugs related to the Kinesis connector and core Flink components. Their work included allowing configuration overrides for Kinesis endpoints, handling AmazonKinesisException gracefully, and addressing errors in the Zookeeper leader retrieval service. They also made minor adjustments, such as updating the CLI help message.
pythonflinkconnectorsqlapache
IBM/sarama
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019
Sarama is a Go library for Apache Kafka.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 2 PRs, 8 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Scott primarily focused on enhancing the `sarama` Go library for Apache Kafka. Their contributions include fixing shutdown and race conditions in a consumer-group example, improving error handling by integrating `log.Panicf` for more context, and adding a sticky partition assignor to improve balancing. Furthermore, the user implemented improvements to consumer group assignment strategies, refactoring existing code, and adding tests to ensure functionality.
golangsaramaapache-kafkago-libraryapache
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