Stephan Zuercher
Engineer at Sierra
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolStephan Zuercher is a seasoned software engineer and architect with 16 years building high-performance, distributed systems across startups and large platforms from San Francisco. He has led infrastructure and traffic teams at Slack (Salesforce) and Twitter, architecting low-latency user stores and an Envoy-based control plane that replaced HAProxy and enabled advanced routing patterns like blue/green deploys and zone-aware routing. A founding engineer at a service-mesh startup and current engineer at Sierra, Stephan blends systems-level thinking with hands-on implementation in Java and Scala. He is an active contributor to the Envoy project, improving macOS builds, filesystem watchers and API features for routing and traffic shaping—work that impacts a widely used cloud-native proxy. Collected experience across API design, L7 routing and service discovery gives him a pragmatic edge in making distributed systems both performant and operable.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, ENGINEERING, Bachelor of Science - BS, ENGINEERING at Harvey Mudd College
Github Skills (13)
http10
macos10
build-system10
api-design10
protocol-buffers10
grpc9
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
url-routing9
testing8
documentation8
devops8
bash7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
envoyproxy/envoy
Jul 2017 - Sep 2021
Cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:851 reviews, 164 commits, 488 PRs in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Stephan contributed to the build system by enabling OSX builds and making OS-independent changes. They made improvements to the filesystem watcher, adding a kqueue-based implementation and fixed some of the test flakiness. The user addressed configuration issues, including fixing gperftools builds and other related compilation errors for macOS.
nanoservicesmore-catsgolangcontainersproxy
envoyproxy/data-plane-api
Sep 2017 - Mar 2018
[READ ONLY MIRROR] Envoy REST/proto API definitions and documentation.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 14 PRs, 1 push in 5 months
Contributions summary:Stephan Zuercher primarily contributed to the API definitions within the `envoyproxy/data-plane-api` repository. Their work involved enhancing the API, specifically for the router and HTTP connection manager components. Key contributions include adding features for response headers and traffic shaping based on cluster weights, demonstrating a focus on improving the Envoy API's capabilities. Moreover, they updated documentation for better clarity.
apienvoyprotobufprotodefinitions
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