Bruno Volpato's photo

Bruno Volpato

Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI & Research Infrastructure

Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years building high-scale distributed systems, query engines, and data platforms. Research engineer on Datadog AI Research (DAIR), building simulation environments, RL training loops, and evaluation infrastructure to post-train observability agents for SRE incident response. Previously led production query and connector systems serving hundreds of millions of queries daily.

Languages

Go Python Java SQL

Platform

Kubernetes GCP Trino DataFusion Kafka Apache Beam

Experience

Datadog

Jan 2024 - Present

Staff Software Engineer

New York, NY

Datadog AI Research: Contribute to retrieval paths, synthetic episode generation, ground-truth labels, and evaluation loops for observability agents. Helped kickstart an operational investigation agent, presented it at Engineering all-hands, and helped secure dedicated product and engineering staffing.

Simulation environments: Generate operational environments with controlled disruptions, telemetry, and ground-truth investigation paths for agent evaluation and RL training. Helped grow the catalog from roughly a dozen hand-built applications to thousands of generated applications.

Query federation: Designed and shipped Connector Server to decouple data-source integration from the query engine. Expanded federation from 5 to 40+ distinct sources for product and AI Research teams. The connector platform cut new-source onboarding from quarters to days.

Query platform: Previously led query planning and connectors serving hundreds of millions of queries daily. Delivered 50x speedups for customer-facing Logs Analytics production queries and reduced a large-timeframe query workload from ~34 seconds to 2.4 seconds (14x).

Leadership & reliability: Formed Query Connectors and grew it to 12 engineers as a shared platform team; mentored across levels and conducted 50+ design and coding interviews. Serve as a Core Incident Commander for severe incidents: 30+ commanded and 120+ responses.

Open query systems: Became a Substrait committer (Cross-Language Serialization for Relational Algebra) and contributed across DataFusion, Trino, Iceberg, and Calcite so plans and data access are portable across engines.

Google

Aug 2022 - Jan 2024

Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Durham, NC

Data platform leadership: Led Dataflow Platform team of 5 engineers responsible for 200+ production pipelines processing petabytes of data daily across Google Cloud.

Reusable pipelines: Moved the team from bespoke customer pipeline delivery toward reusable infrastructure for teams and partners; reduced new pipeline development time by 60% and enabled 3x more use cases with the same team capacity.

Operational reliability: Participated in 24/7 on-call handling P0/P1 incidents, customer escalations, and turnarounds while improving tests, probers, rollouts, support automation, and release safety.

Container security: Led migration to minimal Distroless container images, eliminating over 80% of CVE surface area, and drove multi-quarter migrations and partner launches across data platform teams.

TOTVS Labs

Sept 2015 - Jul 2022

Senior Backend Engineer

Mountain View, CA

Streaming infrastructure: Architected scalable streaming pipelines processing billions of events daily using Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Couchbase, powering ML-driven recommendation engines for enterprise customers.

Rule execution: Built a dynamic configuration-to-bytecode compilation engine, reducing rule evaluation latency by 80% and enabling real-time personalization at scale.

TOTVS

Mar 2009 - Aug 2015

Senior Software / R&D Engineer

Joinville, Brazil

Enterprise integration: Designed and implemented a data integration layer serving 5,000+ global manufacturing companies, processing millions of transactions daily with sub-second latency requirements.

Developer productivity: Built source search and white-box validation tooling, improving team productivity by 30% and reducing bug escape rate.

Education

North Carolina State University

M.S. in Computer Science; B.S. in Computer Science