Meet the Team

I joined Citus to work on challenging distributed systems problems—and to take the awesome database that is Postgres and make it scale out. I’ve been interested in data science and analytics since forever, or at least since college. Before Citus, I was a researcher on machine learning techniques for computer vision, NLP problems, and brain decoding. I earned my B.S. and M.S. degrees from METU in computer engineering. When I’m not at work, you’ll find me listening to classical music and working on my PhD.

I am a software developer. I joined the team at Citus Data to work on distributed systems and databases and especially HyperLogLog. Before Citus, I worked as a software engineer at SAP on distributed databases; I did a research stint at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon; I contributed a translation of Ubuntu into Turkish; and I earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Bilkent University. In my free time, I play experimental games and build flying robots. One of my dreams is to have my own metal workshop.

I joined Citus Data as a principal engineer to help build our fully-managed database as a service, Citus Cloud. My goal: to enable developers to forget about their database and focus on their application instead.

I first started to use Postgres in a computer science class at UC Berkeley. My later work at streaming database company Truviso also involved Postgres. And then I joined Heroku, where I was one of the earliest and longest-serving Postgres engineers, managing thousands of Postgres databases in the cloud. Another claim to fame: I created and maintain WAL-E. My free time is spent with my wife, newborn baby, and learning from the lessons of history.

I am a software developer. I joined Citus Data to scale out Postgres and work on distributed systems. These days I work on Citus Cloud, our fully-managed database as a service. Before Citus, I worked on web and mobile applications, as well as geographical information systems and software quality measurement.

I have B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Bilkent University. When I’m not at work, I spend my time with all kinds of motorcycles and my favorite space opera, StarCraft.

My favorite field in Computer Science is distributed systems. So I joined Citus to work on really difficult distributed systems problems with an engineering team that not only loves what they do, but loves to share their expertise with the community. Before Citus, I worked on blockchain-based data distribution systems, distributed databases, and complex data visualizations. I have also worked on percentile approximations for PostgreSQL and distributed tables (my favorite type of table). My B.S. degree is in Computer Science from Bilkent University.

I joined Citus to work on complex distributed systems problems. In my early days at Citus as the first employee, I created an open source columnar store for Postgres called cstore_fdw, along with a bevy of other useful Citus features. I am an ex-Googler and an active Google Chrome committer, contributing patches to event dispatching and processing in ChromeOS. I have won way too many programming competitions in my day. Nowadays, I dream of distributed databases and winning road bike races in Kitchener, Canada.

As an early team member at Citus Data, I've had a front-row seat to watch the Citus distributed database grow and scale. And I’ve learned the true measure of a product is getting it into the hands of customers with the ease of use they intuitively appreciate. Commitment to doing even the little things well is what makes me most proud of my work, be it an elegant algorithm within AWS, clean Rails UI libraries, or a new SQL feature that just works. When I'm not obsessing over tasks at work, I love playing piano, gardening, sampling new restaurants, or biking around Denver's City Park with the kiddo.

I joined Citus Data because I love Postgres and I believe developers need great documentation. I am a speaker, blogger, writer, and maintainer of popular open source projects, notably PostgREST a RESTful API server for PostgreSQL. In addition to programming, I enjoy teaching and organizing events such as the Bay Area Haskell Users Group. I earned a BS in Mathematics from UW Madison. I have a luddite affection for dumb phones, card games, and chalkboards.

I joined Citus Data to make distributed databases easier to use—and to make it so developers never have to worry about scaling their database. As a principal cloud engineer, I helped to create Citus Cloud, our fully-managed database as a service that scales out Postgres. Before Citus, I was part of the founding team at Product Hunt and a co-founder at Soup.io & Spark59. I’m originally from Austria and yet nobody thinks I have an Austrian accent. When I’m not working, you’ll find me biking across the Golden Gate Bridge: the view of the golden gate never, ever gets old.

I am a principal engineer at Citus Data, although I prefer to be called chief bug fixer. I've been working on distributed systems for over a decade. Citus is the most exciting technology I've worked on. Every time there is a new feature, countless new possibilities are created within the database. I work on all parts of Citus and on lots of crazy ideas. Before joining Citus Data, I worked on distributed operating systems, helped start Route 53 and CloudFront at Amazon, and got a PhD in cooperative self-driving cars. I love mountain hiking but I live in a flat country, so I travel around a lot and cycle on the flats of nearby dunes and tulip fields.

I joined Citus Data to be part of the company that scales out Postgres, so that developers can focus on their app and not their database. At Citus, I am both a software developer and a project manager: I get to create and I get to lead. Before Citus, I worked as a software engineer on train traffic control software and on a mobile development environment in the IoT space. I love software and I code in my spare time, including writing predictive algorithms for College Football game scores. I have B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Bogazici University. I sometimes wonder if the universe is deterministic or not.

Challenging myself is important, which is why I joined Citus Data as a software developer: distributed systems are hard! And I love working on back-end development. Before Citus, I worked on R&D projects in distributed systems, network protocol analysis, and data mining—in the defense industry as well as at Microsoft and Real Networks. I graduated with a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University. In my free time, I hang out with my wife and teenagers and build static ship models.

I joined Citus Data as a software engineer to scale out Postgres. And to do something that had not yet been done: a full outer join of an awesome RDBMS with a robust distributed system. Before joining Citus, I worked as a software developer on an environmental monitoring system, a dynamic data race detection framework, and unified threat management. I earned a B.S. degree from METU and an M.S. degree from Boğaziçi University in computer engineering. I think thread level parallelism is the perfect topic for dinner table conversation.

I am a solutions engineer at Citus Data. I spend my days onboarding customers, advising on data models and sharding strategies, and demo’ing the Citus distributed database to help developers understand how Citus can help them scale out Postgres. I have a Bachelors in Computer Science and a Masters in Computational Linguistics from IIIT in Hyderabad, India. And I’ve published several papers in the field of Natural Language Processing. Before Citus, I worked as a software developer at Epic Systems Corp. Fun fact: I am also a professional ping-pong player. You can catch me flipping, looping, and lobbing a few times a week. 🐋

I joined Citus Data as part of sales and customer success, to help people learn about how Citus can help them grow their business. Our mission: to make it so developers never have to worry about scaling their database. Before Citus Data, I worked in lead development and as an account manager at Percona, Jaspersoft, and MySQL. When I am not working to make customers successful, I hike the mountains of Idaho. I’m also a bit of a foodie, and I love trying out new restaurants as well as trying out new recipes at home.

I joined Citus Data over 5 years ago as a software engineering intern before finishing my degree in Computer Science at IIIT Hyderabad. Flash forward to today, I am now the Lead Solutions Engineer. In my earlier years at Citus, I created new features and wrote documentation. These days I spend my time onboarding customers, and demo’ing our distributed database to those who want to learn whether our sharded Postgres will help them scale out their application. When I’m not at work, you’ll find me at the theatre watching Bollywood movies.

I am a principal engineer and security lead at Citus Data. I joined Citus because I love working on challenging database problems and Citus gave me the opportunity to help create Citus Cloud, a fully-managed service we offer to keep your database worry-free. Before Citus, I spent 5 years working on the core Heroku Postgres team. I graduated with an M.S. in bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I love music, so when I’m not working, I’m probably at a concert or listening to music somewhere.

I joined Citus Data to help users make the most of the Citus extension to PostgreSQL. Goal: to improve user experience one bit at a time. I love being a PostgreSQL Major Contributor and being part of the Postgres community. I contributed the extension facility and the Event Triggers feature to core PostgreSQL, and I also work on documentation, pgloader, and organizing Postgres conferences. Prior to Citus Data, I served in architect, CTO, and engineering leadership roles at 2ndQuadrant and leboncoin.

Recent news: I wrote a book! “Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development” teaches SQL to application developers so they can replace 1000s of lines of code with simple SQL queries.

I joined Citus Data as a Principal Marketing Program Manager to create programs & events that help developers learn what the Citus extension to Postgres can do for them. Before Citus Data, I worked at Oracle as a Principal Engineering Program Manager, where I managed field communications, new product introductions, and events large and small—from Oracle OpenWorld to customer advisory boards. In the operating systems group at Sun, I was the Open Source Community Manager for OpenSolaris where I grew the number of user groups from zero to 150+. I earned my Bachelor’s degree from U.C. Berkeley. A farm girl at heart, I like to hang out in the garden with my chickens when I’m not at work.

I joined Citus Data to enable developers and businesses to scale their data. As the commercial Director of Sales for Citus, my primary responsibility is to be ‘“chief listener” for customers, collaborating with them to address their challenges with performance and growth. Before Citus, I served as a senior Account Executive at Heroku, managing and growing $35 million of Heroku's accounts during a 3 year period in which top-line revenue quadrupled. Previously, I served in both product management and sales roles at AnyPerk, Vivint, and Scan.me. I earned a B.A. in Economics from Wake Forest University, with a minor in Entrepreneurship. Outside of work, you'll find me befriending restaurant owners, trying to discover all the secret menus.

I joined Citus Data because I am obsessed with distributed systems problems like TopK, and I wanted the opportunity to work on beautiful data structures like bloom filters. Prior to working on the Citus database, I built an ETL stack at Bottlenose that ingested more than 10% of all tweets into an online analytical database. At Uber, I worked on the distributed systems layer that powered most of their dispatching stack. My degree is in Computer Science from the University of Applied Science of Amsterdam in Game Technology. In my spare time, when I’m not on the meetup circuit in Amsterdam, I analyse multiplayer video games to extract movement information and social graphs from the players.

I joined Citus Data to be part of something that matters. At Citus, I serve as executive admin to the CEO and his staff, I manage the San Francisco office, and I provide logistical support for internal and external events. Before Citus, I worked as a business analyst for PG&E Academy, and as a compliance analyst for PG&E Gas Ops and Engineering. I am a lifelong student, and I’m not yet done learning new things. I earned a B.S. in Business Management from Indiana Wesleyan University & an MBA from Brandman University. Once upon a time, I proudly served as a Radioman in the US Navy. On weekends, you’ll find me volunteering for Meals on Wheels and Habitat for Humanity.

I joined Citus to make it easy to scale out Postgres and bring worry-free distributed databases to the world. As a solutions engineer, I get to spend my days working with users, answering questions about data models and sharding keys, and making sure that everything goes smoothly with onboarding. Before Citus, I worked with fleets of millions of devices, I managed complex distributed file sharing solutions, and I kept online courses for massive schools running. When I’m not at work, I like to build tabletop role-playing games. I will never stop trying to find something new.

I joined Citus Data because of the people. Based in Istanbul, I am responsible for accounting operations and government relations for our EMEA teams, including working on the Innovation Agendas set forward by the EU & other Governments in Europe. I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Istanbul University and a Master’s Degree in International Accounting from Nisantasi University. And when I’m not at work, I love to play football (some people call it soccer) and table tennis.

I joined Citus Data so more and more enterprises will benefit from Citus, and how Citus transforms Postgres into a distributed database. As Director of Sales at Citus, I work closely with customers to make sure their experience with us is a success, from evaluation all the way to deployment. Earlier in my career, I worked for a fast-growing data platform startup focused on meeting the needs of the Fortune 500. My bachelor’s degree is in marketing and logistics from Central Michigan University, but my learning didn’t stop there: I have formed a lifelong hobby of taking really interesting data science classes. And I have music in my DNA: I come from a family of musicians, directors, and conductors, and I myself play 5 instruments.

I joined Citus Data to help Postgres users take advantage of Citus to scale out their database. At Citus, I’m a solutions engineer, and I collaborate with users on data models for new projects and migrations. I love working on database performance and tuning SQL queries. Before Citus, I was lead developer at crowdfunding company Ulule where I was also responsible for website performance. And at peopledoc, I worked on PostgreSQL full text search. I have a masters in Computer Science & Engineering from Université de Technologies de Compiègne. When not at work, you’ll find me playing the bass viol or reading one of my favorite books, “The Master and Margarita.”

I joined Citus Data to work on distributed systems, and to find ways to pull apart and distribute data. Before Citus, I created tools for machine learning workflows at a leading mobile phone operator; I also worked at Pisano.co on software to monitor and improve customer experiences. Processing millions of feedback items has helped me to understand how Postgres operates and to appreciate the flexibility and power of a relational database like Postgres. I am currently pursuing a BS double major in Computer Engineering and Mathematics at Bogazici University. And in my free time, I train bots on my favorite novels so my favorite characters from different genres can speak to each other.

I joined the Citus team at Microsoft as a Principal Engineer to raise expectations of what a database can do. Citus is at the perfect intersection of analytics, performance, cloud, Postgres, and community. And I believe Microsoft is the perfect place to take Citus to the next level. Before Citus, I worked on streaming analytics at Truviso, at Aster Data, and on AWS Aurora. I’m also a Postgres committer—and have been working on PostgreSQL since I was 16 years old. My B.S. degree is in Electrical Engineering from the University of California San Diego. And when I’m not at work or doing patch reviews for Postgres, you just might traveling the world to yet another PostgreSQL conference.