Piotr Karol Bejda

Piotr Karol Bejda is a Polish software/systems engineer and an IOI 2011 gold medalist for Poland. He holds a BSc (2012-2015) and MSc (2015-2017) in Software Engineering from Jagiellonian University and competed for its ACM-ICPC team. His engineering career runs from Google (2017-2024, storage and the Colossus file system, ending as a technical lead), a founding-engineer stint at the startup Data Ex Machina (2024-2025, acquired), and Datadog (2025-2026) before joining Blacksmith as a Member of Technical Staff in 2026. Blacksmith (blacksmith.sh) is a CI-infrastructure company, not a trading firm, and no quantitative-finance employer appears in his public record.

Notes8

• Quant employment verification: NOT CONFIRMED. No past or present role, internship or student program at a quantitative-investment, trading, market-making, hedge-fund or systematic/algorithmic trading employer appears in his public record. His documented employers are Google (2017-2024), the startup Data Ex Machina (2024-2025), Datadog (2025-2026) and Blacksmith (2026-), all software-infrastructure companies, none of which operates in quantitative finance. The caller's 'BlackSmith' company-index lead (listed industry Financial Services, 'rule based trading strategies covering all asset classes') is a homonym: the person's employer is Blacksmith at blacksmith.sh, a continuous-integration infrastructure startup, whose own engineering posts and the WeAreDevelopers speaker bio confirm the CI-infrastructure focus. His IOI and Datadog/Google pages contain no trading-firm employment. Residual uncertainty: his LinkedIn is not fully readable in this environment, so an unlisted short stint cannot be positively excluded.Jul 24, 2026
• Identity caution: a company index lists 'BlackSmith' as a Financial Services firm running rule-based trading strategies, but that record carries no domain and is a different entity from blacksmith.sh (CI infrastructure); the trading 'BlackSmith' has no connection to this person.2026
• His own narrative corroborates the Google/Datadog arc: 'storage at Google, on Colossus'; 'a Datadog-adjacent eBPF-based debugger at a startup'; and Datadog work on production-grounded code optimization.Jul 24, 2026
• Trajectory: after a seven-year Google run (Warsaw 2017, New York 2022-2024 as Colossus tech lead), he left a Staff-level big-tech role in 2024 for a founding-engineer seat at a startup that was acquired within about a year, then spent about a year at Datadog before Blacksmith in 2026 — a pattern of short, storage/systems-focused stints after long tenure at one large employer.Jul 24, 2026
• A single technical thread runs through all his roles — low-level storage and runtime internals: Google Colossus (file-system metadata plane), Datadog's eBPF-based Go live debugger and self-optimizing-code work, and now CI storage primitives, which makes 'storage foundations' his identifying specialty rather than any employer.2026
• Index-only career timeline (LinkedIn enrichment; not independently primary-sourced): Software Engineer II, Google Warsaw 2017-2018; Software Engineer III, Google 2018-2020; Senior Software Engineer 2020-2022; Staff Software Engineer / Colossus file-system tech lead 2022-2024; Founding Engineer, Data Ex Machina (acquired) 2024-2025; Staff Software Engineer, Datadog 2025-2026; Member of Technical Staff, Blacksmith 2026-. New York from 2018.
• Olympiad/competitive record labels him Piotr Karol Bejda, IOI 2011 contestant for Poland (gold medal). Index and olympiad-statistics pages agree on the full name.Jul 2011
• Speaking: listed speaker at WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 North America with a session 'Why CI Deserves Its Own Infrastructure' scheduled Fri Sep 25 2026, and he has recorded infra-as-code talks for the same conference.Sep 25, 2026
• Authored Blacksmith engineering posts: the 'why I joined Blacksmith' essay (Jul 24 2026) and 'The physics of Docker build caching', both bylined 'Piotr Bejda, Member of Technical Staff'.2026
• Press: financial-media outlet TipRanks covered Blacksmith 'adding former Google Colossus tech lead' Piotr Bejda to strengthen storage capabilities, describing his move and storage pedigree.2026
• Education: BSc Software Engineering 2012-2015 and MSc Software Engineering 2015-2017 at Jagiellonian University (index-derived via LinkedIn enrichment).