Thomas Cooper
Senior Principal Software Engineer at IBM
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Cooper is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience specialising in auto-scaling and optimisation of distributed stream processing systems such as Apache Storm and Heron. He pairs deep research intuition—developed during PhD work at Newcastle University—with hands-on production experience at companies like Red Hat, Reddit, and IBM, driving resilient, scalable Kafka and Kubernetes integrations. A pragmatic backend and DevOps engineer, he has contributed to high-impact open-source projects such as Kafka Cruise Control and the Strimzi Kafka Operator, improving automation, metrics, and container configuration handling. Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, he blends systems performance modelling from an academic background with practical fixes that reduce operational toil in large-scale streaming platforms.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Newcastle UniversityMaster’s Degree Acoustics, Master’s Degree Acoustics at The University of SalfordBSc (Hons) Physics with Space Science and Techology, BSc (Hons) Physics with Space Science and Techology at University of Leicester
Stackoverflow
651reputation
50kreached
18answers
7questions
Github Skills (26)
kubernetes10
kafka10
kubernetes-operator10
java10
javas10
kubernetes-pods10
cluster-manager10
cluster-api10
clustering10
testing9
dockers9
docker9
yaml9
cicd8
gradle7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator
Jul 2019 - Feb 2022
Apache Kafka® running on Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:267 reviews, 51 commits, 53 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Thomas's commits focus on enhancing the Strimzi Kafka Operator, primarily through the addition of container environment variables and corresponding testing. These changes involved modifying Kafka templates, the Container template to the CRD, as well as adding methods and checks to prevent overwrites to Strimzi environment variables. The user implemented fixes related to formatting, added serial IDs, and updated derived resources within the context of Kubernetes and Kafka. Further commits include significant work around adding environment variables to all container templates and refactoring of existing documentation.
kafka-streamsapache-kafkadcosdata-streamsdata-stream
linkedin/cruise-control
Aug 2019 - Aug 2021
Cruise-control is the first of its kind to fully automate the dynamic workload rebalance and self-healing of a Kafka cluster. It provides great value to Kafka users by simplifying the operation of Kafka clusters.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 33 commits, 16 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to improving the functionality and stability of the Kafka Cruise Control system. Their work involved fixing bugs related to task handling, specifically addressing issues with `CompletedWithError` tasks and how they are represented in the user_tasks endpoint. They also added support for newer Kafka broker versions. Furthermore, the user made changes related to metrics reporting and configuration.
operationcruise-controlclusterscluster-managementkafka-cluster
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