Justin Jbeal B.

About Justin Jbeal B.

I\'ve been coding professionally for roughly 20 years. In that time I\'ve been able to work on many different things in many different roles: engineering manager, senior engineer, SRE and dashboard wizard. For the past decade, I\'ve been working in cloud computing, with a specialty in observability and monitoring at \"scale\". I\'m a polyglot engineer, but lately I write a lot of Golang and YAML. In the past I have worked on Ruby, Rails, Node.js, TCL and Java codebases. While I am primarily interested in observability, I have worked on complex systems and application level software as well. I am an engineer at heart.I find observability exciting because it is both broad and deep. The breadth comes from the fact that whatever type of software people run, they\'re going to have the problem of monitoring it and making sure it stays running. The depth comes from the fact that solving this problem well requires elements of systems engineering, platform architecture, cost optimization (avoiding the nine figure Datadog bill), along with high performance programming. Working in observability allows me to see and solve problems that require more than just a pull request.Things I have done:* PingThings - I am the department\'s observability subject matter expert, responsible for the deployment, development and maintenance of monitoring systems and tools at the company. We use Loki for structured, centralized logging and Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics for metrics.* PingThings - I worked as a software engineer on a custom timeseries database called BtrDB (butter dee bee). It ingests and stores streams of high speed timeseries data, most commonly from synchrophasors on the power grid. BtrDB is written in Golang, with GRPC API bindings in Python and Rust.* DigitalOcean - I was a senior engineer on an observability team at DigitalOcean, telling our engineers what\'s going on with their services. We ran an EKK stack hosted on Mesos and a series of VictoriaMetrics clusters called Pandora. I also work on a custom Kubernetes PaaS called docc, which leverages the Kubernetes API and custom CRD\'s to provide engineers a containerized platform with tight integrations to the rest of DigitalOcean\'s infrastructure (Vault, centralized logging, alerts, external API endpoint management, canary deployments, etc.)

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Edge Delta

   Jan 2025 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Edge Delta\'s approach to observability focuses on processing data in flight as opposed to collecting telemetry and querying it in a central location. Intelligent telemetry pipelines enable faster, more scalable observability at a very small percentage of the usual observability vendor bill. I work as a staff engineer on their pipeline team. Since starting, I have worked on two major projects:Gateway Pipelines - A multi tier extension to Edge Delta\'s OpenTelemetry pipeline product designed to address scalability and deployment problems in larger (10k node) kubernetes deployments- Implemented in Go as an autoscaling k8s deployment to separate data ingestion from data processing. Gateway Pipelines communicate via OTLP and use consistent hashing to enable aggregate operations on OpenTelemetry data- Performed all parts of this, from initial design and project planning to team supervision and hands on implementation. Coordinator Pipelines - A control plane for Edge Delta\'s telemetry pipelines, enabling scalable bidirectional communication between the Edge Delta backend and individual agent nodes- Identified problem, wrote proposal document and implemented in Go, using Kafka and NATS.io for a two-level pub/sub architecture.

Education

• Hampton Roads Academy

  Diploma, High School

  1995 — 2001

• University of North Carolina at Greensboro

  M.S., Computer Science

  2007 — 2009

• Wake Forest University

  B.A., Latin

  2001 — 2005