Thibault Charbonnier
Principal Engineer at Kong Inc.
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThibault Charbonnier is a Principal Engineer based in San Francisco with 13 years of experience building high-performance, cloud-native systems and API gateways. As a co-author of Kong Gateway and long-time OpenResty maintainer, he brings deep expertise in NGINX, LuaJIT and FFI-driven extensions that power mission-critical proxies and edge services. He led core engineering at Kong, architecting distributed systems features like rate-limiting, clustering and dynamic certificate handling while improving migrations, metrics, and test reliability. His open-source contributions include core enhancements to lua-nginx-module, lua-resty-core and stream-lua-nginx-module, where he added APIs, performance optimizations and improved observability. Comfortable across back-end, DevOps and documentation, he blends hands-on C/Lua/NGINX work with cross-team leadership and community stewardship. A detail often overlooked: he helped bootstrap Kong from a side project into a company while maintaining deep technical ownership of its runtime internals.
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (European Bachelor), Web & Mobile development, BSc (European Bachelor), Web & Mobile development at ECTEI2 years degree (French DUT), Computer Science, 2 years degree (French DUT), Computer Science at Université Paris 13Master's degree (Diplôme d'ingénieur), Software and Information Systems, Master's degree (Diplôme d'ingénieur), Software and Information Systems at ECE ParisUniversity of California, Irvine
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,320reputation
60kreached
18answers
11questions
Github Skills (44)
markdown10
objective-c10
apidoc10
openresty10
c1110
cffi10
c1710
lua10
api-documentation10
api10
markdown-it10
nsurlsession10
api-gateway10
performance-optimization10
jekyll10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
Kong/kong
Dec 2014 - Feb 2021
🦍 The API and AI Gateway
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:53 releases, 55 reviews, 2217 commits in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Thibault contributed to the Kong API Gateway by fixing issues related to DNS resolution and building the foundation for a plugin to support dynamic certificate handling. They improved the reliability of database migrations and added features such as support for custom timeouts and metrics collection. Additionally, the user made improvements to the unit tests and improved the test setup. The user also refactored code for better performance.
aiapi-gatewaymicroservicesapi-managementserverless
openresty/lua-resty-core
Oct 2016 - Jul 2020
New FFI-based API for lua-nginx-module
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 81 commits, 95 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Thibault primarily contributed to the `lua-resty-core` project, focusing on implementing and improving core functionalities. Their contributions included implementing new API functions like `shdict:ttl()` and `shdict:expire()` for shared dictionaries, enhancing existing features such as `ngx.re.split()`, and fixing several bugs related to the same API. The user also addressed optimizations for shared dictionaries and improved the integration of the FFI-based APIs for stream subsystem.
ffiluanginx-module
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