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A career that reads like a career

An editorial hero, a timeline of roles with a real open end, selected work that opens in place, and a résumé action that prints the page instead of promising a file that was never bundled.

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Available for consulting from January

Ada Okonkwo

Distributed systems engineer

I build storage layers that keep working when a region does not. Twelve years across two continents, most of it on the part of a system that is only interesting at 3am.
Based in
Lisbon
Since
2014
Focus
Replication, consensus
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Illustrated portrait of Ada Okonkwo

Where the work has been

Three roles, each one a longer problem than the last. The highlights are the things I would still defend in a review.

  1. Staff engineer, storage platform

    Present

    NorthwindRemote, Lisbon

    Own the replication layer that keeps four regions consistent. Two engineers, one on-call rotation, no database vendor.
    • Cut p99 write latency from 180 ms to 74 ms by moving quorum acknowledgement off the request path
    • Ran the migration of 2.4 PB to a new log format with no read outage
    • Raft
    • Rust
    • Postgres
    • On-call

  2. Senior backend engineer

    ContosoBerlin

    Grew the ingestion pipeline from 40 to 9,000 events a second and, more usefully, wrote down why it had stopped scaling twice.
    • Replaced a queue-then-batch worker with a backpressured stream: 60 % less memory, same throughput
    • Introduced the deploy-attached alert that halved mean time to identification
    • Go
    • Kafka
    • ClickHouse

  3. Backend engineer

    Lumen AnalyticsLisbon

    First infrastructure hire. Everything from the CI pipeline to the on-call document that nobody had written yet.
    • Moved a monthly batch report from 9 hours to 40 minutes
    • Python
    • Airflow
    • Terraform

Selected work

Choose a project to read the reasoning behind it. The grid stays on screen so the work can be compared rather than replaced.

Pelican

A log-structured store that survives a region loss without an operator awake.

Written to answer one question: what does a store do when the network is not merely slow but wrong? Pelican keeps a single writer per shard and lets readers fall back to a quorum that tolerates one region answering from a stale epoch.

Role
Design and implementation
Year
2024
  • Rust
  • Distributed systems

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