Tomasz Bak
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTomasz Bak is a seasoned backend engineer with 12+ years of experience building resilient, high-scale distributed systems, most recently as a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI after a decade at Netflix. He has deep expertise in service resilience, scheduling, and reactive networking—contributing significant features to high-profile open-source projects like Netflix Eureka, Fenzo, Ribbon and RxNetty, including a sliding-window rate limiter, scheduler scaling and capacity guarantees, and TCP/HTTP RxNetty modules. His work blends low-level protocol understanding with practical production reliability improvements, demonstrated by unit-tested changes that prevent overload and improve autoscaling behavior. Based in San Jose and holding a Master's in Telecommunications Engineering from Warsaw University of Technology, he brings a telecom-rooted perspective to cloud-native architectures. A less obvious strength is his long history of evolving system designs across domains—from Nokia-era telecommunication architectures to modern microservice ecosystems—giving him rare breadth in both legacy and cutting-edge infrastructure.
11 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Telecommunications Engineering, Master's degree Telecommunications Engineering at Warsaw University of Technology
Github Skills (24)
autoscaling10
rate-limiting10
back-end-development10
annotations10
testing10
http10
guice10
java10
annotation-processing10
javas10
tcp10
spring-boot10
architecture9
unit-testing9
udp9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
Netflix/eureka
Jul 2014 - Apr 2016
AWS Service registry for resilient mid-tier load balancing and failover.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 705 commits, 302 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Tomasz contributed to the implementation of a rate limiter within the Netflix Eureka service registry. This involved creating a filter to manage traffic, allowing for the restriction of non-standard clients to prevent system overload. The changes also encompassed modifications to the codebase, including the addition of a sliding window algorithm-based rate limiter and the development of unit tests for the newly implemented filter. These updates enhance the stability and resilience of the Eureka service by providing traffic control.
service-registryresilientmidload-balancingfailover
Netflix/karyon
Aug 2014 - Nov 2015
The nucleus or the base container for Applications and Services built using the NetflixOSS ecosystem
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 commits, 24 PRs, 13 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Tomasz primarily focused on building the core infrastructure and services using RxNetty within the Netflix Karyon ecosystem. Their contributions included abstracting and implementing RxNetty modules for connection-oriented protocols like TCP. Further work involved the creation of example TCP server and updates to existing modules to support multi-server instances. The code changes demonstrate a deep understanding of RxNetty and its integration within the Karyon framework.
containersnetflixossdockerdiscoverykubernetes
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