Steve Niemitz
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteve Niemitz is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, high-performance backend systems for large-scale platforms, now based in the New York City area and currently at Google. He has deep expertise in distributed systems and networking from multi-year stints at Twitter where he shipped fixes and optimizations to Finagle, Netty, and PostgreSQL integrations, and contributed performance-minded utilities to Twitter’s util library. His open-source work spans critical infrastructure projects—including Apache Beam, Mesos/Kafka, and Aurora—where he improved IO connectors, added management endpoints, and brought Docker support and stability fixes to production-grade frameworks. Steve’s contributions often target hard-to-see reliability and performance issues (deadlocks, thread-pool tuning, epoll TCP stats, memory optimizations), reflecting a pragmatic focus on observability and operational robustness. He combines hands-on low-level engineering with systems and DevOps sensibilities, making him effective at bridging product requirements and production runtime realities. Trained as a computer scientist at Rensselaer, he pairs strong fundamentals with a track record of improving widely used open-source systems.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
438reputation
140kreached
12answers
5questions
Github Skills (52)
mesos10
avro10
docker10
bigquery10
data-pipelines10
netty10
back-end-development10
testing10
finagle10
data-serialization10
kafka10
zookeeper10
dockers10
java10
cicd10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
mesos/kafka
May 2016 - May 2017
Apache Kafka on Apache Mesos
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 67 commits, 49 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Steve contributed to the development of the Apache Kafka on Apache Mesos project, implementing features such as HTTP endpoints for managing and monitoring brokers. They modified the executor to export Kafka JMX metrics, and also added functionality to clone brokers. Furthermore, the user focused on optimizing cluster state saving and added the ability to list partition details for a topic, indicating a focus on system management and performance.
apache-kafkaconfluent-cloudapachemesoskafka
apache/beam
Sep 2017 - Sep 2022
Apache Beam is a unified programming model for Batch and Streaming data processing.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:95 reviews, 41 commits, 54 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Steve primarily focused on enhancing the Apache Beam Java SDK, specifically the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) IO connectors. They added functionality to disable validation for BigtableIO writes, and supported reading and writing Avro records from BigQuery. In addition, they optimized code and introduced done notifications for BigtableIO writes, enhancing the reliability and functionality of the data processing pipelines. The user also improved the memory usage in critical path areas.
golangpythonstreaming-databeambatch
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