Santiago Mola
Staff Software Engineer at Datadog
Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSantiago Mola is a Staff Software Engineer based in Madrid with 18 years of experience building and leading backend and data-focused engineering teams across security, observability, and big data domains. He has progressed from founding a startup and contributing to Linux distributions to senior technical leadership at source{d} and Datadog, where he moved from Engineering Manager to Staff Engineer. Santiago is a pragmatic polyglot developer with deep contributions to high-profile open-source projects—Datadog’s Java APM agent, go-git/gitbase, SciPy performance kernels, and language detection in GitHub Linguist—often tackling core encoding/decoding, concurrency, and performance challenges. He pairs systems-level thinking with hands-on optimization (Cython, Go, Scala, Java) and a track record of shipping robust data pipelines and security features like IAST. Colleagues rely on him to refactor legacy logic into testable, production-grade components and to bridge architecture with developer ergonomics. His background in AI and pattern recognition adds a slightly atypical analytical lens to observability and code-intelligence problems.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence Pattern Recognition and Digital Imaging, M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence Pattern Recognition and Digital Imaging at DSIC, Universidad Politécnica de ValenciaUniversitat Politècnica de València
English, Spanish, Catalan
Stackoverflow
873reputation
197kreached
23answers
1question
Github Skills (50)
json10
git10
algorithms10
scipy10
programming-language10
data-pipelines10
tracer10
facebook-api10
python10
testing10
sparse-matrix10
user-authentication10
authentication10
object-storage10
spark-streaming10
Programming languages (33)
Github contributions (5)
src-d/gitbase
Sep 2016 - Jun 2019
SQL interface to git repositories, written in Go. https://docs.sourced.tech/gitbase
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 69 commits, 105 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Santiago contributed to the development of a SQL interface for Git repositories written in Go. Their work focused on defining core classes, including types and schema representation, and implementing a physical relation interface for the commits table. The user also added a memory backend for testing purposes and extended the commits table to include additional fields such as hash, author information, and message. This work demonstrates a focus on building the foundational components of the system for querying Git data.
gosqlsql-interfacegolangast
src-d/go-git
Aug 2016 - Nov 2018
Project has been moved to: https://github.com/go-git/go-git
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 126 commits, 129 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Santiago contributed to the core functionality of the `go-git` project by implementing encoding and decoding methods for various Git object types. They added the `Encode` method to all objects to convert typed objects into core.Object representations. Additionally, they improved the idempotency of the decoding process. The user also added tests to ensure the consistency of the encoding and decoding operations across different object types.
go-gitgit-clientgit-servergolang
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