About Bartek

Bartłomiej (Bartek) Płotka is a Senior Software Engineering Tech Lead at Google Cloud, specializing in Observabilty, Efficiency, Go and Prometheus. Originally from Gdańsk, Poland, he is currently based in London, UK.

With over a decade (since 2012) of experience in software engineering, his expertise lies in building and scaling web, backend, and distributed systems, with a particular focus on infrastructure and observability. He has a proven track record of delivering complex projects and collaborating with diverse teams.

Bartek main focus was always building and running software in web/backend/distributed systems/infrastructure areas. Even though he have ongoing experience as a global-scale SRE, he loves the SWE development the most: building pragmatic, innovative, scalable, high-quality solutions.

After 3y at Intel, he worked at Improbable , a fantastic gaming UK startup with a global Kubernetes infrastructure using and developing impressive and unique systems. In late 2017, we created an OSS Thanos project with Fabian Reinartz, which gained popularity as a default choice for scaling Prometheus. That started his shift to work entirely on open source around the Prometheus ecosystem, becoming a Prometheus maintainer and working as Principal Engineer at Red Hat .

3 years later Bartek joined Google as Senior SWE Tech Lead for Google Cloud Managed Prometheus team. He focuses on building the observability experience in the enterprise, globally scaled, managed manner for those who does not want to run the OSS stack. It also gave Bartek opportunity to focus on improving the key ingredient of robust cloud native metrics in OSS - Prometheus and its standards. Today Bartek is also contributing to Google Cloud, Go, profiling and instrumentation initiatives in Google and OSS.

In 2022 Bartek published the Efficient Go book about Go programming language and ways to improve efficiency of the code we write and run.

Bartek loves innovating, mentoring, teaching, speaking at conferences and working with communities, especially around Observability. That’s why at some point, we created the CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Observability , where we help in the observability areas.

Every year, I mentor others (and motivate others to mentor!) in the CNCF programs. If you would like to be a mentor (or mentee) and help to grow the next generation of open source engineers, let me know ! I am incredibly grateful to those who helped me to be where I am with (often implicit) mentorship. I think we have a duty to help others too.

Outside f professional pursuits, Bartek values time with family (wife, a daughter and a son), gym, volleyball and sometimes not-so-eco-friendly cars or motorcycles (:

Feedback

I am always looking forward to hearing feedback! (:

Especially if you feel angry with what I say or do, I would love to hear that. This way, we all learn! Reach me through any channels listed on main page .

CV

My is CV is my up-to-date Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/

Open Source

I love innovation in SWE space. This is why you see me creating, but also maintaining various projects. Some of them I created or co-created, some of them I joined afterwards. Not exhausting lists are provided below:

More popular ones: Thanos , Prometheus , core , Demo Navigator , prometheus/client_golang , e2e , go-grpc-middleware , bingo , mdox , mimic , jiralert

Other: my , oidc , go-jwt , go-tokenauth , kEdge , grpc-proxy , go-k8sresolver , promeval

Public Talks

Some talks I performed (or co-performed 🤗) since 2018.

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018