John Elliott
Technical Lead at Meta
Lake Forest Park, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Elliott is a seasoned technical lead with roughly three decades of engineering experience and nine years in senior leadership roles, currently guiding infrastructure and build engineering at Meta from Lake Forest Park, WA. He specializes in backend and build systems, with deep expertise integrating Rust and C++ via CMake to modernize large-scale projects and improve cross-platform CI compatibility. His open-source contributions to high-profile Facebook repos—Katran, HHVM, Proxygen, Folly, and Watchman—demonstrate pragmatic problem solving, from adding CXX/Rust bridge tooling to fixing macOS integer overflows and Windows vcvarsall.bat build breaks. He blends hands-on coding (thrift services, structured logging, process caching) with systems thinking to make complex monorepos more maintainable and portable. Colleagues rely on him to translate nuanced platform constraints into robust build and runtime solutions that ship at scale. Unusually for a leader, he still dives into low-level build fixes and cross-language bindings, keeping technical currency while steering teams.
9 years of coding experience
34 years of employment as a software developer
MS, MS at Oregon Health & Science UniversityBS, BS at Oregon State University
Github Skills (17)
c-language10
back-end-development10
windows10
hacking10
build-system10
cmake10
cicd10
automation10
build-automation10
automations10
rust10
thrift10
cprogramming-language10
logging8
system-design8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/watchman
Jul 2023 - Jun 2024
Watches files and records, or triggers actions, when they change.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 PRs, 1 push, 1 comment in 11 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the EdenFS service within the Watchman repository, introducing and modifying Thrift service methods. They addressed integer overflow issues on macOS by creating `chownV2` using `int64_t` values. Furthermore, they refactored process name caching, improved error handling for disconnected EdenFS mounts, and contributed to the integration of new Rust-based features by parameterizing build systems. Their work included significant modifications to the thrift definitions and CMake build configurations.
triggersrecordswatches
facebookincubator/katran
Jul 2023 - Nov 2023
A high performance layer 4 load balancer
Role in this project:Backend & Automation Engineer
Backend & Automation EngineerContributions:3 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the build process and integration of CXX support for the Katran project. This involved implementing CMake functions for managing C++ bindings using the cxx crate, and modifying existing build scripts. They also addressed a build break on Windows platforms related to the `vcvarsall.bat` tool and corrected the quoting issues for Github CI.
load-balancer
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