Sylvain Afchain
Staff Engineer at Datadog
Paris, Ile-de-France
Summary
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RockstarSylvain Afchain is a Staff Engineer in Paris with 12 years of experience building distributed systems, cloud and software-defined networking software. At Datadog since 2020 he focuses on backend and security engineering for the Datadog Agent, contributing kernel-level fixes, signal handling, eBPF probes and file/process access management to harden production monitoring. A polyglot in Go, C/C++, Java and Python, he’s an active open-source contributor to projects like gopacket, Skydive and Juniper Contrail—adding protocol support, real-packet-based tests and critical controller fixes that reveal strong packet-processing and system-level instincts. He pairs pragmatic engineering with a security-first mindset, often working at the boundary between kernel internals and cloud observability.
13 years of coding experience
English, French
Github Skills (38)
network-protocols10
python10
ebpf10
testing10
packet10
linux-kernel10
geneve10
kernel10
systems-programming10
go10
computer-engineering10
network-protocol10
packet-analysis10
packets10
file-system-watcher9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
skydive-project/skydive
Oct 2015 - Oct 2021
An open source real-time network topology and protocols analyzer
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 13 reviews, 1892 commits in 6 years
Contributions summary:Sylvain's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the core functionality of the Skydive project's network topology and protocol analyzer. The commits involve modifying the code to optimize synchronization between analyzers and agents, particularly by relying on the `SyncReply` message. Furthermore, the user refactored existing tests, replacing generated packets with real packet captures and also added new test case for bpf filters. The user's work demonstrates a deep understanding of the system's data flow and aims at optimizing network data processing.
traffic-analysismonitoringreal-timenetwork-topologynetwork-monitoring
DataDog/datadog-agent
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
Main repository for Datadog Agent
Role in this project:Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:1126 reviews, 725 commits, 1187 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Sylvain primarily contributed to the backend system probe code of the Datadog agent by fixing bugs, implementing security features, and improving system monitoring. They implemented solutions for signal handling, improved dentry resolution from the kernel, and addressed issues with kernel-level discarders. The user demonstrated proficiency in Golang, eBPF programming, and system-level programming techniques within a security-focused context. They also addressed several issues related to the management of file access and process contexts within the security-agent, showing their skills in low-level system interactions.
golangdatadog-agentagentobservabilitypmm
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