I'm George, a Software Engineer with a decade of experience, focusing on building safe, reliable and scalable software systems. I have a strong academic background in Computer Science, where I specialized in distributed systems.

Career Experience

Grafana Labs (2021 — Present)

Grafana Labs is a monitoring and observability company which became known for their open source analytics and visualization tool. Over the last 10 years, Grafana Labs has grown into a complete observability platform including logs, traces, metrics and profiles, incident response management, and much more.

I currently work on Loki which is a highly scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.

I previously worked on Alerting, specializing in the Alertmanager, both the open source Prometheus project and the multi-tenant Alertmanager in Mimir. I planned, built and shipped UTF-8 support for the Prometheus Alertmanager, Mimir and Grafana Cloud to support OpenTelemetry.

Cloudflare (2018 — 2021)

Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks on the internet providing a wide range of services from content delivery, performance and security. I worked for 3 years in the Firewall team building industry leading L7 (HTTP) Firewall products and services at global scale.

• I led the design of the Rulesets API so customers could manage their L7 protections, and contributed to the parser and execution engine that checks traffic in real-time on the edge.
• I designed and shipped, collaborating with one other engineer, the Firewall Events API, where customers could query and run analytics against firewall events for their websites (i.e. blocked traffic).

Education

UCL / MSc (Networked Computer Systems) (2014 — 2015)

The Networked Computer Systems is a Masters programme specialising in networks and distributed systems. The 1 year programme covers a wide range of topics such as operating systems, distributed storage systems, consensus algorithms, wireless and radio systems, multimedia codecs, security, and more.

My masters thesis looked at how to enforce software-based fault isolation in web servers such that an exploit of one are of the web server (i.e. parsing HTTP requests) could not be used to gain access to other areas of the web server (i.e. TLS certificates).

I gratuated with Distinction and Deans commendation.

Newcastle University / BSc (Computer Science) (2011 — 2014)

Graduated with First-class honors degree.