Robert “Bob” Vawter

Contact Information

Summary

With 20+ years of software development and operations experience, there’s nothing I can’t figure out, given a terminal window and a strong cup of coffee. I’m used to getting dropped into the middle of customer engagements to solve sticky problems with my technical and educational acumen. I’ve been working in Go for the past seven years and have worked with Java, Kotlin, JS, Typescript and various other languages over the years.

I’m based in Reston, Virginia and am open to travel. I’ve been full-time remote since 2008.

Professional Experience

Cockroach Labs

Principal Field Software Engineer August 2024 - November 2024
Senior Staff Field Engineer June 2020 - August 2024

  • Moved into a customer-facing, “trusted advisor” role to provide services and solutions for the company’s major customers.
  • Built customer-specific Golang tooling, especially around logical replication or solving other unmet needs within the customer’s CockroachDB ecosystem.

Staff Software Engineer February 2018 - June 2020

  • Enhanced CockroachDB’s SQL frontend, schema-change, and bulk-loading subsystems.
  • Founded an internal developer-infrastructure team to give the CI system and many other services a designated owner.

ModelBox Inc.

Principal July 2015 - December 2017

  • Engineered a microservice architecture utilizing Kotlin, Rx, GRPC, and TypeScript for a bespoke knowledge management system.

Perka

Engineer #2 September 2011 - June 2015

  • Designed a mobile loyalty platform using Java and Cassandra, which was eventually acquired by First Data Corporation and incorporated into the Clover Point-of-Sale system.

Google

Research Actualization Engineer April 2007 - August 2011

  • Contributed significantly to Google Web Toolkit, a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler and SDK, focusing on compiler and toolchain improvements.

Site Reliability Engineer September 2005 - March 2007

  • Applied software engineering principles to ensure the reliability of the Google AdWords frontend.

Learning Objects Inc.

Software Engineer March 2004 - August 2004

  • Built extensions for the Blackboard Learning Management System in Java and Perl.

AskThemOnline

Owner & Developer 1999 - 2006

  • Built a Java-based online form and data collection system, before Servlets or JSP was a thing.

Other Ventures

CNC.LLC

Owner & Programmer June 2019 - Present

  • Manage and operate a five-axis machine and prototyping shop in Sterling, VA.