Serkan Özal
Founder at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Ankara, Ankara, Turkey
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSerkan Özal is a founder and systems architect with 13 years building high-performance distributed systems, serverless observability, and big data platforms, combining hands-on JVM and low-level Java expertise with cloud-native design. He co-founded Thundra (acquired by Catchpoint), contributes to OpenTelemetry as a maintainer and approver, and is recognized as an AWS Serverless Hero—bridging product, ops, and open-source communities. His research-focused background (MSc in Big Data & Cloud Computing and ongoing PhD on indexing for Hadoop/Hive) informs practical optimizations like off-heap storage and bytecode instrumentation used in production. Notably, he has a track record of squeezing extreme performance from Java (contributions to the One Billion Row Challenge) and integrating observability agents into local AWS emulation environments like LocalStack. Based in Ankara, he blends academic rigor with startup execution and a habit of prototyping open-source ideas that later ship at scale.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Açıköğretim, İşletme, Açıköğretim, İşletme at Anadolu UniversityBachelor, Computer Engineering, Bachelor, Computer Engineering at Hacettepe UniversityHigh School, High School at Mustafa Kaya Anadolu LisesiDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi / Middle East Technical University
English, Turkish
Stackoverflow
41reputation
4kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (36)
localstack10
multithreading10
testing10
aws-lambda10
instrumentation10
vectorization10
java10
javas10
lambdas10
aws10
performance-optimization10
opentelemetry10
lambda10
dockers9
python9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation
May 2020 - Sep 2024
OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation and instrumentation libraries for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 4 PRs, 49 comments in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Serkan primarily focused on instrumenting and testing AWS Lambda functions within the OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation project. Their contributions include excluding internal Lambda handlers from being traced, ensuring correct behavior for both new and legacy internal handlers. They also worked on integrating the `aws-lambda-java-serialization` library for input/output serialization and added network peer address attributes to the spans generated for okhttp-3.0 instrumentation.
instrumentationinstrumentation-librariesjava-agenttracingauto-instrumentation
gunnarmorling/1brc
Jan 2024 - Feb 2024
1️⃣🐝🏎️ The One Billion Row Challenge -- A fun exploration of how quickly 1B rows from a text file can be aggregated with Java
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:6 PRs, 25 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:The user, serkan-ozal, primarily focused on optimizing the performance of a Java-based application designed to aggregate data from a large text file. Their contributions include implementing the initial solution and iteratively refining it through various performance improvements. These refinements involved code optimization, using vectorization techniques, and optimizing memory usage by utilizing shared memory arenas and regions. They also made several improvements to the build and deployment process.
1brc
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