Tim Burke is a Senior Systems Software Engineer in San Francisco with 12 years of experience building resilient back-end systems for storage, networking, and security at companies like NVIDIA and SwiftStack. He specializes in improving stability and maintainability of complex Python services, with notable open-source contributions to projects such as PyKMIP (KMIP implementation), eventlet, and OpenStack Swift that emphasize robust error handling, compatibility fixes, and secure defaults. His work shows a pattern of tackling subtle edge cases—preserving stack traces, hardening logging, and fixing chunked/Unicode input handling—that reduce production surprises. Tim combines deep systems knowledge with pragmatic refactoring to simplify code paths and improve large-object storage workflows. Comfortable in both corporate and open-source contexts, he brings operational empathy from years of production-facing fixes. He holds a technical foundation from the University of Maryland College Park and a track record of shipping durable, security-conscious solutions.
OpenStack Storage (Swift). Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1236 commits, 1 comment in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily focused on back-end development within the OpenStack Swift project, specifically contributing to the storage service (Swift) by implementing bug fixes related to error handling and addressing py3 compatibility issues. They also made enhancements to large object storage with the addition of handling of the X-Backend-Ignore-Range-If-Metadata-Present header to reduce request overhead. Their work also involved refactoring and optimization, such as simplifying code paths and handling internal issues related to processing. Additionally, they contributed tests to ensure code correctness.
OpenStack Storage (Swift) Client. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:141 commits in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to the `python-swiftclient` project by addressing issues related to object uploads and downloads within the OpenStack Swift storage system. Their work involved modifying the client to better handle large objects by implementing chunked uploading with the `--segment-size` option and improving the deletion of Distributed Large Object (DLO) segments during object replacement. Furthermore, the user updated testing frameworks and corrected the code to correctly utilize various aspects of the Swift API.
swift-clientopendevswiftopenstackstorage
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Tim Burke - Senior Systems Software Engineer at NVIDIA