Willem Ferguson
Principal Systems Engineer at Cloudflare
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWillem Ferguson is a Principal Systems Engineer with 11 years focused on building cloud and compute platforms, currently shaping control planes at Cloudflare after leading Kubernetes-based fleet control at Uber and Agoda. He specializes in extending Kubernetes for multi-tenant private clouds, managing bare metal, VMs, networking and cluster orchestration, and has deep experience with EC2 control plane architecture from his time at AWS. Known for hands-on problem solving, he has debugged Linux kernels, designed SaaS payroll platforms, and stood up CI/CD and integration platforms across multiple companies. His open-source contributions include implementing core Akka.NET IO drivers and DNS fixes, reflecting a systems-level understanding that spans both distributed runtime and network stacks. Based in Amsterdam, he blends strategic vision with implementation rigor, often moving between leadership briefings and low-level troubleshooting. Notably, he initiated Kubernetes and CI/CD initiatives early in his career, showing a consistent pattern of introducing platform-level velocity improvements.
11 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
University of South Africa
Github Skills (12)
udp10
akka10
csharp10
tcp10
bytestring10
dotnet-core10
actor-model9
concurrency9
dns9
distributed-programming9
dotnet8
dotnet-new8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
akkadotnet/akka.net
Mar 2015 - Feb 2016
Canonical actor model implementation for .NET with local + distributed actors in C# and F#.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 22 PRs, 1 push in 10 months
Contributions summary:Willem primarily worked on implementing and porting various Akka IO drivers, including TCP and UDP. They were involved in creating the core functionalities of these drivers, such as the initial port and associated test specifications. Furthermore, the user contributed to the DNS port, including related bug fixes within the DNS manager. Their contributions also included fixing a bug related to the ByteString data structure.
dotnetconcurrencydistributed-actorsdistributed-programmingc-sharp
fergusn/capi-controller
Feb 2021 - May 2022
Contributions:1 review, 4 PRs, 14 pushes in 1 year 3 months
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