Dustin M. Wilson

Professional Experience

Grafana Labs

Senior Software Engineer - Metrics Databases Jan. 2025 – Feb. 2026

• Led migration of Grafana Cloud’s Mimir cells to ARM nodes. Analyzed workload characteristics to ensure a safe migration. Coordinated with Google Cloud and Grafana’s Platform Teams to capacity plan for this effort, reduced annual compute costs by >$1M.
• Drove design and delivery of Mimir’s compactor scheduler. A new architectural component that allowed for more granular partitioning of compaction work. Built out resource-based autoscaling for compaction, reduced annual compute costs by >$200K+.
• Architected and deployed a new design for Mimir’s block headers. The design eliminated per-replica reconstruction of redundant indexes during scale out and reduced store-gateway cold-start latency.
• Systematically improved correctness and reliability across Mimir’s write, storage, and compaction paths. Diagnosed and resolved latent bugs in performance, backpressure, and coordination that only surfaced at multi-PB scale.

DigitalOcean, Inc. 

Senior Software Engineer - Databases, Messaging, and Insights May 2022 – Dec. 2024

• Led multi-quarter initiative to improve control plane SLOs, achieving >99.99% request success rate through re-architecting caching, monitoring, and alerting systems.
• Designed and developed internal telemetry service analyzing ~10M metrics/second from >100,000 customer database clusters, collaborating with data engineering and product teams to deliver usage insights.
• Drove Scrapable Metrics from a “20% project” to GA. Shipped Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoints for Managed Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Kafka), enabling customers to directly integrate DO Databases with with their monitoring stacks.
• Maintained core services powering DigitalOcean Managed Databases, including control-plane HTTP and RPC APIs, services for anti-affinity, firewall rule management, node health monitoring, and telemetry collection.

Numina

Backend and Infrastructure Engineer July 2021 – May 2022

• Built and maintained a real-time insights product end-to-end on ECS, Redis, and RDS Postgres. Owned system architecture, core services, and infrastructure deployment across networking and observability.
• Overhauled data ingestion from a single-AZ EC2 deployment to an autoscaling, multi-AZ ECS architecture.
• Unified infrastructure tooling across CloudFormation, AWS SDK, Terraform, and Serverless into a single suite of version-controlled Terraform modules.

GeoPhy, BV

Data Engineer – US Geospatial & Economic Data Products May 2019 – July 2021

• Developed Airflow data pipelines integrating dozens of collection sources into Athena data warehouse and Aurora Postgres application database.
• Optimized geospatial feature creation pipeline from 72+ hours to under 2 hours through PostgreSQL query tuning, spatial indexing, and data model improvements.

National Economic Research Associates

Analyst - Securities and Finance June 2016 – May 2019

• Performed data analysis for a multi-year investigation into a major financial institution’s pricing and trading behavior, and oversaw handover of our pricing code to financial regulators.
• Applied Monte Carlo, linear programming, and adaptive rejection models to simulate portfolio selection in a heavily constrained financial product.

Education

Columbia University

B.A. in Economics Sept. 2012 - May 2016

Coursework: Econometrics, Mathematics of Finance, Statistical Inference, Probability, Applied Data Mining, Discrete Time Models for Finance

Personal Projects, Open Source Contributions, and Volunteer Experiences

Codecademy

Curriculum Developer and Content Contributor June 2020 – May 2023

• Wrote lesson plans, quizzes, and interactive learning materials for courses on database security and performance, Apache Spark, Python, statistics, and engineering best practices.

DataKind Volunteer

• Deployed cloud-hosted analytics applications with Ansible and Terraform for public-sector clients (e.g., New America Foundation, L.A. Mayor’s office, and International Development Institute).

Professional Skills

General purpose languages: Go, Python, Scala, Julia, Databases and Messaging Systems: Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, OpenSearch, Kafka, Observability Tooling: Grafana, Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, PromQL, Influx, Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Service Mesh: Envoy, IaC: Terraform, Packer, Chef, Cloud Platforms: AWS (ECS, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch), GCP, Azure, CI/CD: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, API Technologies: gRPC, Workflow Orchestration Tools: Airflow, Temporal