DEXTER BRADSHAW
Bainbridge Island,WA
Summary
Accomplished systems software architect and engineer specializing in distributed systems, virtualization, and cloud technologies. Expertise includes designing scalable, high-performance platforms and developing complex technical architectures that enable seamless integration and global operability for industry leaders such as Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. Proven innovator in cloud-native solutions, including hyper-converged infrastructures and distributed storage systems, leveraging advanced skills in Kubernetes, containerization, and runtime frameworks to optimize system efficiency. Committed to advancing next-generation distributed architectures that empower autonomous agentic AI systems through the integration of cutting-edge algorithms, resilient computing infrastructures, and collaborative engineering strategies that address emerging technological challenges.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Principal Architect, Distributed Systems
Apple, Inc.
06.2022 - Current
- Proposed the development hyper-converged infrastructure solutions for Apple Private Cloud to enable seamless integration with proprietary systems and scalability across diverse enterprise needs.
- Designed and developed of a confidential compute platform within Apple-owned data centers to enhance data security and privacy protocols.
- Designed, developed, and managed the engineering of Instance Autoscaling Groups for Apple Silicon workloads, enabling efficient scaling to support hundreds of thousands of instances across any cloud platform, cluster controller, or node controller.
- Spearheaded the design and development of Kubernetes-based serverless compute infrastructure using a peer pod abstraction layer on Apple’s private cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), streamlining application deployment and runtime operations.
- Led a team to port and migrate Kubernetes node manager (Kubelet) and the full OCI stack, including containerd (the CRI protocol) and runtime environments, to the macOS platform and Apple Silicon, ensuring cross-platform operability.
Senior Principal Software Design Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
05.2019 - 05.2022
- Designed and implemented integrated infrastructure and advanced gRPC runtime environments for a next-generation, distributed cloud operating system, emphasizing zero context switching and zero-copy marshaling for optimized performance.
- Developed and implemented of distributed algorithms for Azure Autonomous Edge systems, focusing on building scalable distributed storage and computing infrastructures to meet the demands of edge computing.
- Engineered the integration of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) standard into Azure Autonomous Edge infrastructure, enabling seamless and efficient container storage management for IoT and embedded systems.
Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Distributed Systems
Oracle Corporation
01.2018 - 05.2019
- Designed and deployed a Kubernetes-based microservice for capturing and asynchronously uploading the Linux Foundation’s etcd snapshots to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure object storage, eliminating the need for intermediate file creation.
- Directed the architectural development of Oracle’s scale-out event streaming, queuing, and notification systems, enabling high-throughput and reliable data processing pipelines for cloud-based operations.
- Owned the end-to-end implementation of scalable pipeline processing systems within OCI, enhancing asynchronous data communication and data analytics capabilities and ensuring robust integration with Oracle’s cloud platform and application services.
Consulting Member of Technical Staff, DBaaS
Oracle Corporation
02.2017 - 01.2018
- Provided technical oversight and expertise for the design and development of control plane services for provisioning and managing Oracle database instances on virtual machines within Oracle’s second-generation cloud infrastructure.
- Managed the deployment of DBaaS control plane services across new global regions (including Seattle, Indiana, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam), ensuring consistent operational standards and seamless service scalability.
- Engineered an event logging pipeline to ingest DBaaS control plane workflow data into Elasticsearch, providing real-time monitoring and analytics for improved operational efficiency.
Senior Software Design Engineer
HBO Code Labs, Inc.
04.2014 - 02.2017
- Architected and implemented containerization infrastructure to enable co-tenanted microservices deployment on AWS EC2 virtual machines, leveraging CI/CD pipelines and artifact repositories to optimize release processes.
- Led the end-to-end design and buildout of a universally available service discovery platform for large-scale microservices, ensuring consistent availability and load balancing across distributed environments.
- Created and implemented a scalable distributed load testing framework for HBO streaming services using Locust swarms on AWS EC2, enabling comprehensive performance benchmarking and optimization.
- Automated the deployment of video metadata ingestion pipelines for HBO’s streaming services, enabling configuration management with Jenkins pipelines, streamlining deployment workflows.
- Developed robust microservice platforms to support HBO’s video streaming services, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance within a highly demanding operational environment.
Principal Software Design Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
01.2010 - 04.2014
- Built and maintained the monitoring, analysis, and automated repair systems for the HdInsight service, ensuring consistent performance and reliability of distributed Hadoop workloads running on Azure while optimizing for cost and operational efficiency.
- Architected a groundbreaking bandwidth throttling mechanism for HDFS/WABS, enabling dynamic client-side throttling that functioned independently of Azure Blob Storage servers, improving data transfer rates, flow control, and reducing latency.
- Engineered and optimized the HDFS/WABS filesystems to support direct data streaming for Hadoop jobs to and from Azure Blob Storage, eliminating intermediate storage requirements and driving performance gains and reliability using pipelined data processing.
- Led the design and production of a solid-state storage IOPS offload prototype for SQL Server 2014, driving the integration of cutting-edge storage technologies and delivering substantial improvements in query performance and database throughput.
- Worked with Intel engineers to prototype advanced kernel-bypass mechanisms for integrating storage-class memory (SCM) into SQL Server, developing application-level direct memory access solutions that achieved faster data retrieval and reduced overhead.
- Enhanced the SQL Server buffer pool manager by creating a multi-level caching mechanism leveraging SCM hierarchies, delivering caching and memory management and performance improvements for SQL Server SKUs in on-premises and cloud environments.
- Consulted extensively on defining requirements for the SQL I/O subsystem in virtualized environments, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Azure virtual machines, ensuring compatibility, scalability, and performance across diverse deployment scenarios.
Education
ABD Doctoral Candidate - Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada12-1995
Master of Mathematics (M. Math.) - Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada08-1989
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) - Double Major in Mathematics & Computer Science
University of The West Indies
St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago06-1985
Skills
- Technical architecture proficiency
- Systems software development
- Cloud infrastructure and systems architecture
- Proficient in distributed system design
- Kubernetes orchestration
- Virtualization technology proficiency
- Infrastructure-free service implementation
- Hyper-convergence expertise
- Advanced distributed block and object storage scalability
- Proficient in advanced distributed algorithms
- Microservices design and development
Accomplishments
- Designed Instance Autoscaling Groups for Apple Silicon workloads, enabling scalability to hundreds of thousands of instances across multiple cloud platforms and cluster controllers and enhancing Apple’s private cloud infrastructure efficiency and flexibility.
- Architected Oracle’s cloud-scale event streaming and queuing systems to establish high-performance message passing infrastructure while managing Kubernetes microservices for Linux Foundation’s etcd snapshots to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure object storage.
- Built an asynchronous gRPC C++ framework that integrated privacy protocols within Apple’s confidential compute platform, enabling secure data processing and communication across distributed systems.
- Led architectural design for an SQL Server buffer pool extension at Microsoft that leverage storage class memory (SCM) to optimize OLTP workloads, contributing to the development of next-generation SQL Server solutions and the SQL Azure cloud database.
- Developed a multiplexed Common Log File System (CLFS) on Windows Server 2020 R2, enabling components like Microsoft’s kernel transaction manager, transactional NTFS, and registry systems and revolutionizing transaction processing and reliability across Windows Server products.
- Designed a scalable microservice discovery framework scaling to tens of thousands of microservices for HBO streaming services and led the creation of a scalable distributed load-testing framework leveraging Locust master/drone swarms and AWS EC2.
Languages
English
Native or Bilingual
French
Limited Working
German
Limited Working
Interests
Hobbies: Double bass (classical, jazz ensemble), gourmet cooking, wine-tasting, cigar and rum connoisseur, recreational mathematics, mathematical physics and cosmology, computer graphics, philosophy, science fiction, literature, hiking,
Sports: Performance sailing, rowing and sculling, rugby, cricket, squash, mountain biking, distance running, competitive swimming
Timeline
Senior Principal Architect, Distributed Systems
Apple, Inc.
06.2022 - Current
Senior Principal Software Design Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
05.2019 - 05.2022
Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Distributed Systems
Oracle Corporation
01.2018 - 05.2019
Consulting Member of Technical Staff, DBaaS
Oracle Corporation
02.2017 - 01.2018
Senior Software Design Engineer
HBO Code Labs, Inc.
04.2014 - 02.2017
Principal Software Design Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
01.2010 - 04.2014
ABD Doctoral Candidate - Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Master of Mathematics (M. Math.) - Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) - Double Major in Mathematics & Computer Science
University of The West Indies
ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE
- Principal Software Design Engineer | Senior Software Design Engineer | Microsoft Corporation | Redmond, WA
- Research Assistant | Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Labs | Toronto, Canada
Publications
Paxos Replicated State Machines as the Basis of a High-Performance Data Store. William J. Bolosky, Dexter Bradshaw, Randolph B. Haagens, Norbert P. Kusters, and Peng Li, Microsoft. NSDI ’11: 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation March 30–April 1, 2011, Boston, MA, USA.
The CORDS multi-database project. IBM Systems Journal, 34(1):39—62, January 1995.
Failure isolation and recovery in composite multi-databases. Proceedings of the 1994 Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research Conference, p.6, October 31-November 03, 1994, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Architecture for transaction management in the CORDS Multi-database service. Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research—Volume 2, pp. 873-887, 1993, Toronto, Ontario, Canada