Tyler Rockwood
Wisconsin, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTyler Rockwood is a Staff/Principal software engineer with 11+ years building high-performance, distributed systems and developer tooling across startups and major platforms like Google and Redpanda. He favors simple, well-abstracted solutions to hard problems, with deep expertise in low-level systems concerns—WebAssembly integrations, memory and stack management, database query behavior, build systems, and garbage collection. Tyler has shipped production work on notable open-source projects including wasmtime and Seastar, and contributed to widely used tooling like Firebase CLI and Bazel Kotlin rules. As a founding engineer at Shortwave and a recent contributor to Redpanda’s WebAssembly-based data transforms, he blends product instincts with systems-level craftsmanship. Based in Wisconsin, he brings a practical, detail-oriented approach informed by both backend and frontend contributions and an uncommon comfort with obscure internals (e.g., query planners and server-client sync).
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science and Software Engineering, Bachelor's degree Computer Science and Software Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
11reputation
237reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (64)
kotlin10
asynchronous10
babel610
api-rest10
javascript10
c-language10
system-programming10
data-pipelines10
gitlab-api10
apidoc10
api-design10
async10
restful-api10
memory-management10
command-line-interface10
Programming languages (30)
Github contributions (5)
redpanda-data/redpanda
Mar 2023 - Apr 2025
Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Systems Engineer
Back-end Developer & Systems EngineerContributions:2367 reviews, 886 PRs, 571 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:Tyler Rockwood primarily worked on the implementation of WebAssembly-based data transformations, contributing to the core functionality of the Redpanda streaming data platform. His commits introduced and enhanced features related to the integration of WebAssembly VMs, including performance optimizations, API versioning, and the support for various low-level aspects of WebAssembly modules like memory allocation and handling of different data types. His contributions involved defining the ABI, enabling access to the internal topics and the efficient handling of output topics. The contributions are on a backend component level.
realtimezookeeperdata-platformkafka-api10x
bazelbuild/rules_kotlin
Feb 2020 - Oct 2022
Bazel rules for Kotlin
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 9 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Tyler primarily contributed to the Bazel rules for Kotlin repository by implementing and modifying features related to Kotlin compilation. Their work involved allowing resources within Kotlin directories, correcting and adding compiler options such as `-Xbackend-threads`, `-Xreport-perf`, and `-Xno-optimize`. The user also updated the project to Kotlin 1.7.20 and made changes to support testing both K2 and the old compiler for Jdeps.
bazelkotlinruleskotlin-librarybazel-rules
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