Sebastian Burckhardt
Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond
Sammamish, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Burckhardt is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond with over two decades of engineering experience and 11 years focused on research and advanced systems. He brings deep expertise in distributed systems and durable task orchestration, having contributed foundational backend work and bug fixes to high-profile open-source projects like Orleans and Azure Durable Functions. His contributions include implementing durable actors/entities, improving multi-cluster testing, robust orchestration/event handling, and fixes that improved reliability for large-blob operations and continuation semantics. Prior to Microsoft Research he applied rigorous verification techniques to mainframe memory subsystems at IBM, and he holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, low-level problem solving that bridges research prototypes and production-grade cloud frameworks.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (27)
azure-storage10
event-handling10
back-end-development10
testing10
net10
azure-functions10
dotnet10
distributed-systems10
durable-functions10
asp-net10
entity-framework10
dotnet-core10
orchestration10
orchestra10
backend10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Azure/azure-functions-durable-extension
Mar 2019 - Jan 2023
Durable Task Framework extension for Azure Functions
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:61 reviews, 74 commits, 129 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian implemented the initial and subsequent revisions for the durable actors in Azure Functions, including the core features of the durable actors such as tracing, client API, locks, and tests. The user also simplified entity state management, refactored the code to rename "actor" to "entity" globally, and refactored the code to rename operation content to input. Furthermore, the user added support for scheduled entity signals and added a mechanism for providers to override the scale monitor.
durableazure-functionsazure
Azure/durabletask
Feb 2019 - Nov 2022
Durable Task Framework allows users to write long running persistent workflows in C# using the async/await capabilities.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 181 reviews, 31 commits in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily contributed to the backend logic of the Durable Task Framework, focusing on features related to orchestration, event handling, and sub-orchestrations. Their work included implementing functionality for sending events, supporting fire-and-forget sub-orchestrations, and improving the handling of timers and extended sessions. Additionally, the user addressed a bug related to fast `continueAsNew` operations within the Azure Storage backend, ensuring data consistency and reliability. Furthermore, they implemented the capability to download and decompress large blobs.
async-awaitdurablecsharplongpersistent
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