Damian Peckett

Software Engineer (Contract)

Berlin · Germany

Focus Areas

  • High-reliability distributed systems
  • High-performance networking
  • Distributed storage

About

Engineer with a passion for building, operating, and managing high reliability distributed systems.

This profile only covers my professional achievements. Over the years I've tinkered on a ton of hobby projects, covering everything from embedded systems, systems engineering, single page web apps and even developing and running a wireless ISP in college. Visit my GitHub for more information.

Distributed storage and high performance networking are areas that I enjoy the most. Anything where you have to think twice before invoking memcpy or making an extra syscall.

Experience

Jan 2024 – Present Berlin, Germany · Remote Contract

Software Engineer (Software Defined Networking)

Self-employed · Contract

Contract development of high-performance Linux networking systems in Go and Rust.

  • VPN technologies including WireGuard and IPsec.
  • Userspace TCP/IP using gVisor netstack.
  • XDP / eBPF program development.
  • AF_XDP kernel-bypass (Amazon ENA, Mellanox ConnectX).
  • NIC and kernel offloads (TSO/GSO/GRO, kTLS, checksum offload, flow steering).

Recent projects

Oct 2021 – Jun 2023 Berlin, Germany Full-time

Kubernetes Engineer

German Edge Cloud

  • Developed a GitOps-based Kubernetes platform with Argo CD.
  • Built a Kubernetes operator for OpenStack resource management.
  • Created a CLI for deploying edge-cluster simulators (Terraform, OpenStack, K3s).
  • Built a fast-booting ephemeral OpenStack test environment (Packer, Terraform).
  • Performed VM networking experiments with KubeOVN and OpenStack Neutron.
Jun 2020 – Oct 2021 Berlin, Germany Full-time

DevOps Engineer

kloeckner.i GmbH

  • Kubernetes administration on Google Cloud using Terraform, Helm, and Helmfile.
  • Virtual machine management using Ansible.
  • Kubernetes operator and tooling development in Go.
Jul 2018 – Nov 2019 London Area, United Kingdom Full-time

Software Development Engineer II

Argos

  • Event-driven Spring Boot 2.x microservices using Apache Kafka and Docker.
  • Developed a Testcontainers-based framework for integration testing of microservices.
Feb 2014 – Jul 2018 Greater Brisbane Area Full-time

Software Development Engineer

Expedia Group

  • RESTful microservices using Java, Docker, CI/CD, and AWS.
  • Authentication and authorization infrastructure team.
  • Led the development of static code analysis infrastructure and tooling supporting approximately one thousand developers.

Education

University of Southern Queensland

Bachelor's Degree, Electrical / Mechanical Engineering

2010 – 2014 · Second Class Honours, Division A

  • Mechanical and machine design including modelling, finite element analysis, statics, and dynamics.
  • Electronics including analog, digital circuit design, and embedded systems.

Publications & Projects

Turning The Arduino Uno Into An Apple ][

Apr 6, 2015

Personal project write-up emulating the entire Apple ][ microcomputer on a stock Arduino Uno (a significant technical achievement at the time). The article was simultaneously featured on the front pages of Hacker News, Slashdot, and Hackaday.

Adaptive Markov Decision Control of High-Frequency Drip Irrigation Systems

Oct 30, 2013 · USQ Honours Thesis

Used reinforcement learning to optimise irrigation schedule efficiency, including the development of a fully featured Arabidopsis thaliana water balance model. Model verification used regression against a real-world test with a custom sensor network, feature selection via sensitivity analysis, a highly multithreaded stochastic Markov decision training algorithm, and evaluation on a real-world plot.