# Sam Stokes

> Experienced technical leader with a focus on distributed systems and scalability

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/samstokes

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ LaunchDarkly
Jan 2019 – Present | Oakland, California
• Led team building and scaling distributed data systems for customer-facing experimentation and observability products.
• Coached engineers and provided technical strategy advice across teams to ensure successful project execution with high quality.
• Designed novel data processing approaches for low latency to enable market-leading product launch.

### Software Consultant @ Independent
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019
Focusing on data engineering, distributed systems and scalability.

### Engineer @ Honeycomb.io
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California
Developed and maintained projects across the stack, including:
 * Honeycomb's business-critical, custom-built columnar storage engine, Retriever
 * full-stack feature development
 * Ruby SDK and Beeline API

### Engineering Manager - Platform @ Honeycomb.io
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California

### Software Consultant @ Independent
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco
Data engineering and integration projects for various clients, including:

 * major contributions to Bottled Water, a Kafka change data capture solution for Postgres https://github.com/confluentinc/bottledwater-pg

### Staff Software Engineer - Pulse Feed @ LinkedIn
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco

### Senior Software Engineer @ LinkedIn
Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | Mountain View

### Co-founder @ Rapportive
Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco
I lead the technical team that builds the Rapportive browser extension that seamlessly integrates social context and activity into Gmail, and supporting backend services.  Responsible for technical direction, selection of platforms and service providers, and vendor negotiations.

Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn in February 2012.

### Founder @ Rectangle Software
Jan 2009 – Jan 2010
Software consultancy specialising in web application development. Worked on several projects including Go Test It, a cross-platform web application testing service, for which I implemented a system in Scala and RabbitMQ to manage and monitor test workers.

### Head of Software Development @ mo.jo
Jan 2008 – Jan 2009
Built a Rails application for engaging communities in open innovation projects, using which we ran the Open Ventures Challenge project in aid of Cancer Research UK.

### Financial Software Developer @ Bloomberg
Jan 2006 – Jan 2008
Built the Bloomberg People Search app for Blackberry and supporting server.  Integrated the T-Zero trading system interface with Bloomberg's POMS platform, and refactoring it for 20-fold improvements in performance and maintainability.  Developed robust, performant and highly concurrent C++ and Java code in a complex and evolving environment.

### Software Engineer @ Symbian Ltd.
Jan 2005 – Jan 2006
Maintained the Symbian OS implementation of J2ME and its component JSR APIs for Bluetooth, 3D graphics, multimedia and contact management.


## Education
### Y Combinator

### BA in Computer Science
University of Cambridge


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/samstokesuk
- Portfolio: https://five-eights.com
- Portfolio: https://hachyderm.io/@samstokes

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Source: https://flows.cv/samstokes
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/samstokes/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12