Itamar Shtull-Trauring

Goals

Design new systems, in a creative and knowledge-expanding environment, with a focus on distributed systems.

Work Experience

2004 - Present: ITA Software

2007 - present: Senior Software Engineer, Airline Reservation System's Schedule Server team

Acting as tech lead for the team since start of 2008, leading a small group of programmers and working on overall system design with tech leads of other groups. Working on coordination of disaster recovery planning for the reservation system project as a whole.

Worked as part of team on design and implementation of transactional airline schedule distribution server, receiving schedule inputs from three different sources and distributing them to four other systems. Designed and implemented large parts of the persistence layer, as well as transactionality, replication and high-availability. Developed core business logic and protocol implementations.

2006 - 2007: Software Engineer, Airline Reservation System's Core team

As part of ITA's new airline reservation system, written from the ground up in Common Lisp, designed and oversaw implementation of the access control framework. The framework allows sophisticated and flexible policies based on interactions between user roles, requested actions and arbitrary object properties.

2004 - 2006: Software Engineer, Flight Availability team

Conceived, designed and implemented two independent projects for the operations group: a customizable reliable multicast library with congestion control, written in C++ and Python, and a prototype-based configuration library and language for concisely configuring large numbers of similar but non-identical systems.

Worked as part of team on distributed high-performance server system written in C++, with each server handling tens of thousands requests per second. Coding included development of new features, integration of a new internal network protocol, communications support for external systems, airline-specific proprietary business logic as well as maintenance and bugfixes.

2002 - 2004: Independent contractor

Designed and implemented distributed educational system for a government agency in California. Designed database synchronization protocol and algorithm, allowing syncing of data from multiple sites and supporting offline read/write access. Built form generation toolkit, GUI client and a cross-platform installation, network update and deployment software running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Worked for companies in New York City, San Francisco, France and Netherlands, including:

Instant messaging/email notification system for Technorati.
RFID and wireless networking work, as part of an inventory tracking proof-of-concept by Masters of Branding.
XML<->Word document processing server using XML-RPC and COM for Infrae.
VoIP protocol work (SIP).

2000 - 2002: Chief Technology Architect, Zoteca

Designed and implemented startup's content hash-based secure data sharing platform. This included client libraries, a server system, and applications built on top of the framework. Author of a patent for Zoteca's technology (see link below).

1999 - 2000: Lead Developer, OneBigTable.com

OneBigTable, a NY-based startup in the areas of food and culture. Using Zope, an object-based web application server, led small team that:

Built a high-level food, nutrition and recipe database, with advanced searching and information mining capabilities, together with a work flow system.
Programmed the company's website, including membership, automated update capabilities and GUI administration tools for Windows and Unix.

1994 - 1999: Programmer, MAXIMA New Media

Programmed a number of multimedia CD-ROM titles, as well as a multimedia informational center for the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Developed back-ends for various database-driven web applications.

Open Source Development

Developed large parts of the Twisted networking framework, implemented in Python. Maintainer and one of the main developers of the core networking package (TCP, UDP, SSL, and so on). Contributed to SIP, FTP, mDNS (zeroconf aka Rendevezous) and HTTP 1.1 protocol implementations. Worked on GUI integration, threading infrastructure, XML-RPC and SOAP web services support, authorization and authentication framework and the component architecture.

Lead developer for a number of projects, including:

Perspective Broker (Twisted's language-independent remote object/RMI protocol) implementation in Java.
Coil, a configuration library.
Fusion, a C++ integration layer for Twisted.

Contributed bug fixes and patches to a number of Open Source projects including Zope 2 and Python.

Papers and Presentations

Patent #6662198 for Method and system for asynchronous transmission, backup, distribution of data and file sharing, with Prof. M. Satyanarayanan (director of Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh).

Taught tutorials at Emerging Technologies Conference 2004, O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2003.

Co-authored Networking For The Rest Of Us, with Glyph Lefkowitz, presented at USENIX03 conference, FREENIX track (PDF).

Speaker at the PyCon 2005, PyCon 2003 and EuroPython 2002 conferences.

Wrote a series of articles on protocol design for webservices.xml.com as well as articles for xml.com and OnLAMP.

Education

2004 - 2009 (expected graduation): Bachelor of Liberal Arts, with focus on humanities, Harvard University Extension School.

1996 - 2000: ~80 credits of mathematics and computer science (out of 120 required for BS), Tel-Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Personal Details

US Citizen. Living in Cambridge, MA.