Stephen Atherton
Principal Engineer at Snowflake
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolStephen Atherton is a Principal Engineer based in Sunnyvale, California with roughly nine years of focused experience in backend and distributed systems engineering and a longer history of software architecture work. He currently drives core platform initiatives at Snowflake after a multi-year tenure as a Senior Software Engineer at Apple and direct contributions to FoundationDB, the well-known open-source distributed transactional key-value store. Stephen’s contributions to FoundationDB reveal a knack for improving observability and reliability—adding granular error types, enhancing backup/restore reporting, and hardening HTTP client DNS handling—skills he carries into production-scale cloud systems. His background includes leading architecture efforts and mentoring teams, merging deep systems-level troubleshooting with pragmatic delivery. A Penn State computer engineering graduate, he blends enterprise-scale discipline with open-source craftsmanship to make complex distributed systems more observable and resilient.
8 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering at Penn State University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (12)
error-handling10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
system-monitoring10
api-design9
restful-api9
debug9
rest-api9
api-rest9
debugging9
performance-tuning8
multithreading8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (4)
apple/foundationdb
May 2017 - Oct 2020
FoundationDB - the open source, distributed, transactional key-value store
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 27 reviews, 844 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Stephen made several contributions focused on improving the error reporting and status monitoring features within the FoundationDB project. The commits show involvement in modifying the backup and restore process to enhance how errors are reported in backup status, improve the processing of mutations, and address issues with DNS resolution timeouts in the HTTP client. The changes include the addition of new error types to provide more granular reporting on system health and the enhancement of logging to help track and diagnose connection failures.
bigtabletransactionaldistributed-databasefoundationdbdatabase
satherton/foundationdb
Oct 2018 - Oct 2020
FoundationDB - the open source, distributed, transactional key-value store
Contributions:4 commits, 292 pushes, 145 branches in 2 years
transactionalfoundationdbdatabasekey-value-storekey-value
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