Sébastien Pahl
Senior Principal Systems Engineer at Cloudflare
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSébastien Pahl is a senior principal systems engineer and entrepreneur with 16 years building large-scale distributed platforms, developer tools, and automation across Cloudflare, Mesosphere, Red Hat, GitLab and early-stage startups. He co-founded Docker and Opstrace (acquired by GitLab), blending product vision with hands-on backend and DevOps work—evidenced by contributions to DC/OS and implementing core observability plumbing like DNS clients, Cortex/Grafana integration and cloud provider support. At Red Hat he led Operator SDK teams, and at Mesosphere and Cloudflare he drove production-grade container and metrics infrastructures, showing a consistent focus on cloud-native operations. Based in Seattle, he moves fluidly between founding companies, leading engineering teams, and shipping open source, with a knack for turning complex distributed systems into practical developer-facing platforms. An unusual detail: his background spans formal research in autonomous driving networking to teaching low-level C/Unix—skills that surface in his systems-first approach to product engineering. He combines entrepreneurial grit with deep platform engineering and observable-systems expertise.
16 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
EpitechY CombinatorEconomics English, Economics English at Université Paris NanterreLycée Français de Hambourg
French, German, English
Stackoverflow
319reputation
22kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
monitoring10
kubernetes10
observability10
package-management10
python10
go10
dns10
build-automation10
kubernetes-pods10
postgresql9
dockers9
gcp9
docker9
aws9
system-administration9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
dcos/dcos
Apr 2016 - Oct 2017
DC/OS - The Datacenter Operating System
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 307 commits, 498 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Sébastien primarily contributed to the back-end aspects of the project, evidenced by code changes in `pkgpanda/build/__init__.py`. Their work involved modifying build processes, package management tools, and system configurations. The commits also demonstrate a focus on integrating remote tracking branches and making adjustments to the internal build system.
kernelvdiisolationpythondcos
opstrace/opstrace
Nov 2020 - Feb 2021
The Open Source Observability Distribution
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:12 reviews, 14 commits, 12 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Sébastien implemented a DNS client and integrated it with the application, enabling DNS management functionalities. They also worked on integrating with various cloud providers like GCP and AWS. Furthermore, the user contributed to setting up the infrastructure for Cortex, Grafana, and API proxy by integrating them with a PostgreSQL database, showing strong experience in backend development, cloud configuration, and DevOps practices.
tracingobservabilitymetricsmonitoringlogs
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.