# Brian Troutwine > Staff Engineer at Datadog Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/briantroutwine My professional focus is systems programming with an application toward memory and CPU constrained environments, fault-tolerant and critical software in high-scale deployments. I am a frequent international public speaker on these topics. I'm interested in building reliable software systems that have to cope with some extreme or another. I put a fair deal of focus on testing techniques to detect regressions, design failures as well as communication with the community involved in the software project. I love to engineer difficult software for unusual problem domains and work together with others to do it. I am the author of Hands-On Concurrency with Rust, a book on machine sympathetic parallel programming in the Rust language from Packt Publishing. ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer @ Datadog Jan 2021 – Present I am concerned with the performance of software on single machines, that is, how do we get the most out of the high-capability computers that are available to us. This work is part systems programming, dev tools and good old fashioned grinding. My primary area of focus is creating a system that makes performance regression detection straightforward for non-experts, to the point where it becomes a CI step, part and parcel of my belief that if you give people good, reliable information they'll steer themselves. I focus on improving the resource consumption and reliability of the Datadog Agent. ### Staff Engineer @ Goodwater Capital Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Burlingame, California I was the Infrastructure Lead at Goodwater Capital. Infrastructure is responsible for the following, in no particular order: - Provide a stable and comprehensible deployment tools for our engineering staff. - Provide a deployment environment that allows our engineering staff to build high-quality software for business users. - Provide a continuous integration environment that allows our engineering staff to build high-quality software for business users. - Ensure the security of our compute resources. - Systematically address instability and insecurity of our existing and future compute resources. - Partner with engineering staff to debug serious outages. - Partner with engineering staff to ensure that proposed software architectures meet stability and quality goals. - Reduce compute costs through optimization of existing systems or redesign. Infrastructure at Goodwater Capital does not: - Build features for business end-users. - Perform quality assurance testing. - Ensure the stability or quality of end-user focused software independent of the original engineering staff. In my role as lead I made sure that each of these tracks of responsibility kept ticking over as close to invisibly as possible. ### Software Engineer @ Dropbox Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area I worked in the Application Performance team, tasked with caring for performance in Dropbox as a whole, addressing regressions in the same through tooling, process updates and direct engineering. ### Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering @ Unity Technologies Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Author, "Hands-On Concurrency with Rust" @ Packt Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 From November 2017 to May 2018 I wrote "Hands-On Concurrency with Rust". This work is an overview of modern hardware concurrency primitives, a motivated tour through Rust standard library internals and important crates. It is my intention that readers finish the book able to build locking primitives from first principles on x86 and ARM, have comfort reading through the Rust standard library code and can link Rust into existing code bases. Please find a longer post on the writing of the book here: https://blog.troutwine.us/2018/06/07/hands-on-concurrency-with-rust/ ### Software Engineer @ Postmates Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area I was a Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead in the Infrastructure team. I was responsible for the original development of the cernan aggregation server -- a system which supports multiplexing and manipulating structured and unstructured data streams between producers and aggregators. Cernan allowed the Infrastructure Ops teams to gradually transition products, freeing the organization from the hard-stop, hard-start model of spinning up new best-practice logging, event streaming and telemetry aggregators. I also led a "superfund" team, responsible for performing service-extraction on a vital, no-stop system inside Postmates. This work was informed by applying best-of-breed randomized testing to the existing system, rationalizing its internals, producing a telemetry-based model of the system and an operations plan for gradual transition. ### Senior Software Engineer @ AdRoll Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area I was an engineer on the real-time bidding project, a globally distributed system that services multiple million requests / second in less than 100 milliseconds. I have focused on fault detection and mitigation through telemetry, performance optimization and socializing new engineers to critical systems engineering. My work has increased total system reliability and saved substantial operating costs. ### HuffPost Code Blogger @ The Huffington Post Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 I did a monthly book review series, Peculiar Books Reviewed, for the Huffington Post Code blog. In each post I make the case for expanding the canon of Software Engineering texts beyond the usual Mythical Man Month et al gang. Find it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-troutwine/ ### Software Developer @ Rackspace Hosting Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Bay Area Erlang developer with the Foundation Business Unit. I was a primary developer on a project called FireEngine which provides a service layer over all of our datacenter network devices; it's software defined networks for off-the-shelf and legacy network gear. FireEngine is a globally distributed application which runs in each Rackspace DC and is the lowest-level layer in the Rackspace network automation setup. ### Systems Administrator @ CarePilot Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 I filled an almost classical systems-admin role at CarePilot. I took over their infrastructure and built it into a multi-machine Debian deployment with puppet tying it together. I worked closely with the development team to make their lives easier and, I suppose, ended up taking on release engineer responsibilities as my tenure wore on. Now that I mention it, in retrospect, I dabbled as a: * release engineer * DBA * operation developer * data mining developer (from prod. logs and such) ### Lead Developer @ FluentCare Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 FluentCare, at the time of my involvement, was a health-care focused startup building the first app in a partner cloud. The application I developed against was meant to be run in a browser and interact with a backend application done up in Java. (FluentCare was a close partner, giving me eventual access to this backend application.) In retrospect, the idea was somewhat before it's time and somewhat limited by the environment of the browser. It all got a bit bogged down, I pivoted to CarePilot and there, to the best of my knowledge, the project stayed on FluentCare's end. I hope it got revisited. It was tackling a hard problem for hospitals. ### Cofounder / Primary Software Developer @ Bridgetown Software Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 After my time at SellerEngine I thought there was a good opportunity to do general-purpose, rule-based repricing for Amazon book sellers. This is pretty common now, but in those days most sellers would periodically go through the Amazon interface, update prices from a personal spreadsheet--or based on gut feeling--and repeat every week or so. While still a student at PSU, a friend and I began work on such a product. The data-collection from Amazon was done up in erlang--a language new to me, at the time--and a web-interface to the data done up in Ruby on Rails--a framework new to me at the time. In retrospect a number of architecture mistakes were made--RBDMS as shared state, for one--but these were naive times. Analytics and rule-based processing were done by my partner in python. In the end, he finished his masters studies and moved on to a teaching position and I left it running on auto-pilot until the interesting bits of tech were taken off my hands and I wrapped my undergraduate degree. ### Python Software Developer @ SellerEngine Software Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 This was my first Real Job as a software developer and, in retrospect, I was given way too much freedom with too little knowledge of either the craft or the problem domain. I helped to develop middleware Python applications to collect Amazon marketplace data. That's a nice way of saying I scraped data on books where-ever Amazon gave it up. This data was used to price customer inventories, being ultimately fed into a 'native' application. I mostly just plonked stuff into a database and didn't understand, truly, the scope of what was being attempted. ### Student Research Associate Research Computing @ University of Chicago Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 I Collected 3D surface scans of Buddhist artifacts as a part of the Xiangtangshan Caves Project. This was a delightful project meant to make the after-effect of cultural devistation a little less worse. Namely, the aforementioned caves had been plundered in the late 1800s and, while it was impossible to repair the damage, it was possible to scan items in museums and then attempt to reform the caves as they existed. I got to spend quite a bit of time in the Smithsonian, which was great fun. I developed a prototype version of a "scan stitcher", a tool to partially automate assembly of 3D surface scans. We used an engineering CAD tools--as I recall-- to work with the surface scans. I don't recall the prototype working especially well, but when it did it saved quite a bit of manual alignment. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Portland State University ### Associate Degree of Science in Mathematics and Computing Missouri Academy of Science, Mathematics and Computing ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bltroutwine - Portfolio: http://troutwine.us --- Source: https://flows.cv/briantroutwine JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/briantroutwine/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12