Topher Olson
Chief Architect at Switchboard Software
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTopher Olson is a Chief Architect in San Francisco with two decades of experience designing distributed storage systems and large-scale applications, currently orchestrating data operations at Switchboard Software using Python, Scala/Spark, AWS, and Kubernetes. He brings a deep systems background from roles at Google, Facebook, Oracle, and as founder-level engineer at Treode, where he helped design an open-source key-value database. Known for combining pragmatic engineering with architectural vision, Topher focuses on resilient, scalable data infrastructure and operational choreography. An early adopter of distributed clustering (work at Oracle predated the Big Data era) and a self-described lifelong debugger ("arguing with the compiler since 1986"), he pairs rigorous academic training (MS CS, UC Santa Cruz; BS CMU) with hands-on execution. Colleagues note his emphasis on developer productivity and real-world constraints—he also values commute sanity, preferring impactful work without the long travel.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa CruzB.S. Mathematics / Computer Science, B.S. Mathematics / Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
76reputation
4kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (92)
hpa10
k8s10
starlark10
argo10
gitops10
bazel-rules10
google10
pypi10
docker10
docker-image10
machine-learning10
batch-processing10
data-engineering9
cocoa9
mlops9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
Topher-the-Geek/experiments
Jul 2015 - Dec 2022
Contributions:14 commits, 1 PR, 21 pushes in 7 years 6 months
Treode/store
May 2014 - May 2014
Contributions:32 commits, 54 PRs, 192 pushes in 10 days
transactionalshardeddatabasepostgresqlreplicated
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