Simon Cooper
Principal Software Engineer at Elastic
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Cooper is a Principal Software Engineer based in Cambridge with 19 years of experience building distributed systems and developer-focused tooling. Currently at Elastic, he advances the core of Elasticsearch through backend development, refactoring, and compatibility work—contributions that touch indexing, storage and internal test infrastructure for a widely used open-source search engine. Prior roles at Featurespace saw him lead design and prototyping of high-throughput event processing platforms, while earlier work at Red Gate involved shipping production-grade developer tools like SmartAssembly. He combines deep systems-level competence with a pragmatic focus on maintainability and performance, often improving code quality and formatting standards across large codebases. Cambridge-educated in Computer Science, he brings both long-term architectural thinking and hands-on implementation skills, with a track record of moving complex, distributed features from prototype to production. He quietly favors improving tests and developer ergonomics as a lever for long-term reliability and velocity.
18 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (MA) (Cantab) Computer Science, Master of Arts (MA) (Cantab) Computer Science at University of CambridgeRoyal Grammar School, Newcastle
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (40)
amazon-elasticsearch10
indexing10
java10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
generics10
elasticsearch10
elasticsearch-api10
linq9
clr9
testing9
reflection9
git9
enums9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/elasticsearch
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1390 reviews, 49 commits, 1061 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Simon's commits primarily focus on refactoring code and implementing features in the Elasticsearch core codebase. They apply code formatting standards, including the application of Spotless. The commits show involvement in areas like indexing and data storage, particularly relating to upgrades and compatibility. Furthermore, they are making changes to internal test code, demonstrating an understanding of core functionalities and potentially performance optimizations.
restfulsearch-engineopensearchelasticsearchjava
thecoop/lucene
Oct 2022 - Mar 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Contributions:29 pushes, 7 branches in 2 years 5 months
solrapachesearch-engineluceneelasticsearch
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