Sean Quah
Senior Software Engineer at Confluent
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSean Quah is a Senior Software Engineer based in London with 10 years of experience building performant, reliable backend systems across startups and infrastructure-focused companies. He has driven measurable impact—reducing hosting costs by 20% and cutting join times for large distributed chat rooms by 90% at Element—while operating production services for millions of users. His background spans low-level C network stacks and high-level Python systems, and he contributes to prominent open-source Matrix projects like Synapse and Sygnal, fixing race conditions, security issues, and scaling bottlenecks. Comfortable across the stack, Sean combines performance profiling, database query tuning, and pragmatic engineering leadership to turn complex reliability problems into production-ready solutions.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng Engineering at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (19)
debug10
python10
syn10
twisted10
performance-optimization10
postgresql9
apn9
matrix9
webpush9
indexing9
websocket9
indexer9
rest-api8
debugging8
api-rest8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
matrix-org/synapse
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Synapse: Matrix homeserver written in Python/Twisted.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 1196 reviews, 356 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Sean primarily contributed to fixing bugs and improving code quality within the Synapse Matrix homeserver. Their commits focused on resolving issues related to media thumbnail selection, improving server performance by optimizing garbage collection and indexing database queries, and fixing errors within the API. Furthermore, the user addressed a race condition, improved logging for debugging, and implemented security fixes related to path traversal in the media repository.
pythonmatrix-synapsematrix-synapse-homeserverhomeservermatrix
matrix-org/sygnal
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
Sygnal: reference Push Gateway for Matrix
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 39 reviews, 15 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Sean primarily focused on improving the code quality and maintainability of the Sygnal project. They made several changes, including using absolute imports for consistency, removing Python 2-style inheritance, and adopting Python 3-style super calls. Additionally, the user fixed errors related to APNs and web push notifications, and refactored the handling of app ID matching to improve the robustness of push notifications.
push-gatewaypythonpushgatewaymatrix
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