Pawel Knap
Software Engineer at Datadog
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPawel Knap is a seasoned software engineer with 12 years of experience building backend systems and infrastructure, currently contributing at Datadog from Boston. He has a strong Go and systems background—evidenced by meaningful contributions to well-regarded projects like the file-system event library notify and the kite microservice framework—plus cross-platform work such as Windows system-info integrations and inotify-based event handling. His career spans startups and enterprise teams (Filestack, Koding, SessionM/Mastercard) where he has driven redesigns of FUSE-based file systems, mTLS auth for blockchain products, Kubernetes/Helm deployments, and production AWS automation. A physics-trained thinker with MSc honors, Pawel combines rigorous analytical skills with pragmatic engineering, often preventing subtle issues like goroutine leaks and compatibility regressions. He mentors peers, shapes architecture, and prefers tackling low-level, platform-adjacent challenges that improve reliability and observability.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Physics, graduated with honors 5.0 (A), Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Physics, graduated with honors 5.0 (A) at Politechnika Krakowska im. Tadeusza Kościuszki
Polish, English
Github Skills (10)
golang10
microservices-application10
filesystem-events10
go10
microservices10
notification10
filesystem9
windows8
inotify8
system-design7
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
rjeczalik/notify
Sep 2014 - Dec 2020
File system event notification library on steroids.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 95 commits, 10 PRs in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Pawel primarily focused on enhancing the `notify` library by refactoring and reworking the `Event` type and related event handling. This included the addition of a `Kind()` method and the removal of recursive events. Additionally, the user implemented an initial inotify-based event handling mechanism, demonstrating a focus on file system event monitoring using the Go programming language within the context of the project's core features.
filesystemgolangfilesystem-librarynotificationsfilesystem-events
koding/kite
Jun 2016 - Mar 2017
Micro-service framework in Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 6 PRs, 1 push in 9 months
Contributions summary:Pawel primarily focused on refactoring and improving the `dnode` package, addressing compatibility issues with newer Go versions by modifying the `Scrub` method to handle private embedded structs. They also implemented a Windows-specific implementation for system information gathering, expanding the project's platform support. Additionally, the user made several minor fixes and improvements, including a fix to prevent the leak of a goroutine in the `kite` package.
gomicroservicesweb-frameworkdiscovery-serviceauthentication-backend
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