Sylvain Afchain
Staff Engineer at Datadog
Paris, Ile-de-France
Summary
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RockstarSylvain Afchain is a Staff Engineer based in Paris with 13 years building robust distributed systems, cloud-native services, and software-defined networking solutions. He blends low-level systems expertise (C/C++, eBPF, kernel interactions) with production-grade Go and Java back-end engineering, currently shaping security and monitoring at Datadog. His open-source contributions include substantive work on Datadog’s agent internals and the widely used gopacket library—implementing protocol support, improving packet capture, and hardening system probes. Comfortable across network protocol stacks and cloud platforms, he repeatedly focuses on correctness and observability, from Geneve and VLAN handling to kernel-level discarder fixes. Colleagues rely on him for tricky systems debugging where networking, performance, and security intersect.
13 years of coding experience
English, French
Github Skills (35)
system-programming10
python10
ebpf10
testing10
packet10
linux-kernel10
geneve10
kernel10
go10
computer-engineering10
network-protocol10
packet-analysis10
security9
filesystemwatcher9
it-security9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
skydive-project/skydive
Oct 2015 - Oct 2021
An open source real-time network topology and protocols analyzer
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 13 reviews, 1892 commits in 6 years
Contributions summary:Sylvain's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the core functionality of the Skydive project's network topology and protocol analyzer. The commits involve modifying the code to optimize synchronization between analyzers and agents, particularly by relying on the `SyncReply` message. Furthermore, the user refactored existing tests, replacing generated packets with real packet captures and also added new test case for bpf filters. The user's work demonstrates a deep understanding of the system's data flow and aims at optimizing network data processing.
traffic-analysismonitoringreal-timenetwork-topologynetwork-monitoring
DataDog/datadog-agent
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
Main repository for Datadog Agent
Role in this project:Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:1126 reviews, 725 commits, 1187 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sylvain primarily contributed to the backend system probe code of the Datadog agent by fixing bugs, implementing security features, and improving system monitoring. They implemented solutions for signal handling, improved dentry resolution from the kernel, and addressed issues with kernel-level discarders. The user demonstrated proficiency in Golang, eBPF programming, and system-level programming techniques within a security-focused context. They also addressed several issues related to the management of file access and process contexts within the security-agent, showing their skills in low-level system interactions.
golangdatadog-agentagentobservabilitypmm
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