I am passionate about complex, distributed, efficient systems. Throughout my career I’ve designed them, implemented, improved and ran services made on top of them. That mix allows me to not get entrenched in a developer, designer or administrator point of view. I love low-level stuff, kernel hacking or optimizing things to the last bit on one hand and dealing with huge complex services on the other.
By education, I hold a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master in computer science, both from the University of Warsaw. By experience, I’m much more of an engineer than scientist.
I started my career while still being a student by reliably solving hard problems of a company producing software for utilities sector. That involved integrating their Java stack with MS Office and OpenOffice, receipt printers, writing custom bridges between Java and C# and other crazy hacks.
I’ve later moved on to work on NEC HydraSTOR – back then, the world’s fastest, distributed, globally deduplicated storage for backups. I’ve started as a software engineer optimizing the lowest levels of storage, then moved on to hacking some kernel modules, then to optimizing inefficiencies in various places of the stack and eventually to leading the design and prototyping an internal filesystem underlying the distributed storage.
My last job was site reliability engineering at Google. Our team was making sure that Bigtable, probably the world’s largest database, was running uninterruptibly despite Google’s crazy pace of growth and changes. I have eventually become the tech lead of that team, responsible for setting goals and day-to-day operation. Among many things, I’ve been responsible for productionizing Google’s Cloud Bigtable service.
Throughout my career I’ve also taught various courses at the Univerity of Warsaw, most notably advanced courses in operating systems.
Finally, I’ve decided that it’s time to spread what I’ve learned to as many companies as I can. This is why I’ve founded Unoperate.
Marek Dopiera 