Aaron J Smith

The Rust replacement for AWS’s legacy switch agent, translating Linux kernel network state into ASIC hardware

• Owned the specification of correct daemon behavior, adopted as the team’s ground truth, enforced by property-based testing over random event sequences; mentored an engineer through the event generator
• Root-caused and fixed defects in the daemon’s core data path: a kernel-to-hardware desynchronization traced through the Linux kernel source to conflicting definitions of route identity, and a deadlock where ACL entries with identical content shared one key while the Myers diff addressed them by position
• Moved the team off legacy release pipelines onto a dedicated pipeline gating on lint, unit and integration tests, and a pre-production stage of physical switches; showcased org-wide as a model for other teams

Amazon S3 Vectors, a new public vector storage service

• Owned the public API design as an early engineer, driving the design review with principal engineers and the security team before authoring the spec in Smithy
• Delivered an asynchronous compaction service that raised sustained per-index PUT throughput 8x to 40 MB/s, removing compaction from the customer request path

Log compression, the Rust format behind Amazon’s exabyte-scale logging fleet

• Owned the state machine and the auto-detection behind zero-config onboarding, which unlocked fleet-wide adoption and nine-figure annual storage savings
• Drove adoption across S3’s index services and seven log-reader libraries, writing the Java and Python bindings that unblocked those teams; led three engineers building fleet-wide tracking of unrealized compression savings
• Uncovered a log data-loss risk in a gzip-to-Zstandard migration, reproducing it by stress-testing service restarts until an ungraceful shutdown corrupted logs; designed the mitigation that kept the migration on schedule
• Led a real-time Apache Iceberg ingestion system for the same log data from prototype to production at petabytes per day, decomposing the design across two engineers

Taught two courses per semester including a special-topics course in data compression, with roughly 300 students and 15 paid learning assistants

• Designed a rate-sorted entropy coder that sorts arithmetically coded symbols into quality layers a receiver can drop with no extra signaling; US patent, dissertation, and an M-JPEG reference coder in Java
• Residual-domain HEVC/H.265 transrater in C++ on the HM reference software, retargeting bitrate by requantizing coded residuals rather than fully decoding and re-encoding

• Proposed a frameless camera sensor architecture that times how long each pixel takes to gather a configurable amount of light, instead of how much light it gathers per frame, producing an asynchronous high dynamic range pixel stream; NOSSDAV 2017 paper