David Taylor
Principal Engineer at Cockroach Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inGo Development and Data Management
David Taylor is a Principal Engineer based in New York with 14 years of experience specializing in distributed systems and database internals, and has been at Cockroach Labs since 2015. He is an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects such as Vitess, Pants, and Pebble, where his work spans SQL parsing, build-system caching, and low-level key-value store optimizations. His contributions include adding LOCK/UNLOCK and FOREIGN KEY support to Vitess's sqlparser, improving Pants' artifact caching with connection pooling and configurable compression, and introducing xxhash64 checksums and reduced-allocation readers in Pebble. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate, he pairs systems-level performance tuning with practical automation and documentation skills. He’s comfortable moving between core infrastructure, tooling, and docs to deliver reliable, production-grade distributed systems.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (33)
caching10
key-value-database10
key-value-store10
documentations10
python10
mysql10
testing10
databases10
python-multiprocessing10
data-structure10
keyvalue10
go10
sql10
performance-optimization10
build-automation10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/pebble
Dec 2020 - Feb 2022
RocksDB/LevelDB inspired key-value database in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:65 reviews, 32 commits, 66 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the `pebble` key-value database, focusing on low-level optimizations and API enhancements for sstable management. Their work involved refactoring code to reduce memory allocation overhead, particularly in `sstable/reader.go`, and improving performance when opening and closing readers. They also added features to the public API, such as `ChecksumType`, and implemented support for `xxhash64` checksums. Furthermore, the user refactored and extended test capabilities.
golangrocksdbtransactionalnosql-databasedatastore
pantsbuild/pants
Mar 2013 - Jul 2015
The Pants Build System
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:48 commits, 22 PRs, 12 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to the build system's core functionality by adding features to the context and goal execution flow, and also enhancing artifact caching. They introduced options to kill nailguns before exiting and improved the performance of artifact caching by enabling connection pooling and optimizing artifact storage. The user also refactored the caching mechanism to improve performance and added support for configurable compression levels for cache artifacts. Additionally, they worked on refactoring and enhancing the code related to the build system's caching, target management and added a new feature to support target tags.
pythonprotobufaws-lambdapantsshell
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