Tom Van Bussel
Staff Software Engineer at Databricks
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Van Bussel is a Staff Software Engineer based in Amsterdam with 7 years of experience building and hardening large-scale data infrastructure at Databricks. He specializes in back-end systems for distributed data processing, contributing notable fixes and features to Apache Spark and Delta Lake that improve memory management, checkpointing, and core storage semantics. His work demonstrates a pragmatic focus on stability and maintainability—refactoring core components, tightening invariants, and expanding test coverage to prevent OOMs and improve observability. Comfortable working deep in JVM/Scala code, he blends production-grade engineering with open-source collaboration on two of the most widely used big-data projects. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from Radboud University and brings both academic rigor and hands-on systems craftsmanship to cloud-scale analytics. An under-the-radar strength is his attention to developer-facing metrics and interfaces, making complex runtime behavior more transparent for operators and users.
7 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc) Computer Science at Radboud University
Dutch, English
Github Skills (22)
apache-spark10
spark10
performance-analytics10
performance-monitor10
delta-lake10
big-data10
java10
performance-measurement10
scala10
javas10
performance-analysis10
performance-tuning10
performance-monitoring10
data-engineering9
data-structure9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
delta-io/delta
Jan 2020 - Jan 2023
An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:111 reviews, 9 commits, 30 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the Apache Delta Lake project by implementing and refactoring core features related to the storage framework. Their work includes adding interfaces like `getBasePath`, refactoring components such as `DeltaInvariantCheckerExec`, and modifying commands like `DeleteCommand` and `UpdateCommand`. They also made improvements to code style and test suites, indicating a focus on the codebase's functionality and maintainability.
analyticsprestodbflinkbig-dataspark
apache/spark
Sep 2020 - Nov 2021
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:38 reviews, 6 commits, 18 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the Apache Spark core, implementing and improving features related to checkpointing, metrics exposure, and memory management within the `UnsafeExternalSorter`. Their work addressed critical aspects of Spark's performance, including allowing for spilling with nulls and preventing potential out-of-memory errors. Further contributions include exposing additional stage metrics to the user interface. Their changes involved modifications to core Java and Scala files within the `core` module of the Spark project, demonstrating a focus on improving the stability and efficiency of data processing.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
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