Steven Simpson
Principal Engineer at Grafana Labs
Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Simpson is a Principal Engineer at Grafana Labs with a background in building and hardening large-scale observability and storage systems. Over five years in senior roles he has driven back-end improvements to flagship open-source projects like Grafana, Mimir and Cortex, focusing on alerting, rate limiting, and ingestion reliability for multi-tenant Prometheus ecosystems. He combines systems-level rigor from an Engineering Masters in Computer Systems Engineering with hands-on performance and refactor-driven work that improves API responsiveness and failure isolation. Previously he led engineering teams in high-performance and verification domains, bringing experience across distributed systems, DevOps, and concurrency hardening. Based in Norway, he’s known for pragmatic, measurable improvements—such as preventing failed ingestions from degrading rate limiting—and for contributing directly to widely used, production-critical observability platforms.
5 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Engineering Masters, Computer Systems Engineering, Engineering Masters, Computer Systems Engineering at University of Bristol
Github Skills (24)
kubernetes10
rate-limiting10
back-end-development10
alertdialog10
alertifyjs10
distributed-systems10
alertview10
alerts10
go10
prometheus10
kubernetes-pods10
alarmmanager10
backend10
metric10
notificationmanager10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
grafana/mimir
Feb 2021 - Jan 2023
Grafana Mimir provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:114 reviews, 142 commits, 85 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Steven's commits primarily focus on improving the performance and reliability of the Grafana Mimir project. They addressed issues related to rate limiting in the distributor, making the system more robust to failures. Key changes included preventing failed ingestion from impacting rate limiting and optimizing the handling of rate limiter reservations. Additionally, the user refactored the codebase, converting to interfaces and improving the efficiency of the rate limiter.
tenantobservabilitygrafanaprometheusstorage
cortexproject/cortex
Feb 2021 - Jul 2021
A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:135 reviews, 48 commits, 53 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Steven made several code contributions focusing on improving the stability and performance of the Cortex project. They modified the rate limiting mechanism in the distributor to handle failed ingestion attempts, and they updated the ingester to return a 400 status code for certain limits. The user also addressed concurrency issues with the idle compaction process. The user also worked on implementing features for per-tenant retention periods.
golangscalabletenantprometheus-exporterlong-term
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