Travis Downs
Vice President Hardware Solutions at UTC RETAIL
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTravis Downs is a hardware and operations leader with 10+ years of engineering and manufacturing experience, now serving as Vice President of Hardware Solutions at UTC Retail. He progressed through roles from production and operations management to director-level supply chain leadership and general management, consistently focusing on scaling reliable hardware production. Earlier in his career he was a hands-on test engineer for PEM fuel cells at GM’s Advanced Propulsion Center, blending rigorous lab testing, data analysis, and SOP development. Travis also contributes to high-performance open-source projects—tackling memory allocation, diagnostics, and UTF-8 validation optimizations in widely used repos like Seastar—demonstrating rare low-level performance expertise for a hardware executive. He brings a pragmatic mix of shop-floor sensibility, supply-chain strategy, and systems-level performance tuning. Educated in communications with additional engineering coursework, he pairs technical fluency with clear stakeholder communication.
10 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree, Mass Communication/Media Studies, Associate's degree, Mass Communication/Media Studies at Monroe Community CollegeEngineering, Engineering at University at BuffaloBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mass Communication/Media Studies, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mass Communication/Media Studies at SUNY Geneseo
Stackoverflow
62,388reputation
3.0mreached
540answers
424questions
java
top-1%
hashtable
top-5%
x86-64
top-1%
caching
top-1%
cpu-architecture
top-1%
sse
top-1%
Github Skills (56)
caching10
benchmark10
c-language10
assembly10
performance-monitor10
performance-analytics10
intel10
multithreading10
utf10
memory-management10
cpu-architecture10
benchmarking10
c1110
java10
performance-measurement10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
andikleen/pmu-tools
Sep 2018 - Jun 2021
Intel PMU profiling tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 14 PRs, 13 comments in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Travis primarily contributed to the `jevents` tool within the repository, focusing on fixing bugs and improving its functionality. Their work involved modifying code to address issues such as incorrect handling of MSR index, parsing errors in qualifiers, and handling of cache directories. They also introduced features like supporting frontend_retired events and allowing "name" attributes in raw event strings.
perfintel-pmuprofilingperformance-analysispmu
scylladb/seastar
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
High performance server-side application framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:179 reviews, 31 commits, 50 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Travis primarily contributed to improving the performance and diagnostics of the Seastar framework, focusing on memory allocation and management. Their work included optimizing small pool allocations, enhancing memory diagnostics reports to include allocation failures, and correcting memory usage metrics. Additionally, they improved the stall detection mechanism by addressing spurious wakeups and introduced functionality to debug kernel backtraces, reflecting a strong emphasis on system-level performance optimization.
seastarc-plus-plusdpdkframeworkperformance
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.