Reynold Xin
Cofounder at Databricks
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolReynold Xin is a cofounder of Databricks and a seasoned engineer with 14 years building distributed data systems from San Francisco. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and combines deep research pedigree with product instincts to turn big-data ideas into production-grade software. Reynold has been a key contributor to Apache Spark—authoring features like configurable closure serialization and a DiskBlockObjectWriter to improve shuffle and storage performance—and helped productize the ecosystem through Koalas by adding packaging, I/O utilities, and user-facing APIs. His open-source work spans back-end systems, streaming connectors (Apache Bahir), and even Spark website maintenance, reflecting a rare blend of low-level systems engineering and developer-facing productization. That combination of academic depth, hands-on full-stack contributions, and business development experience shapes his technical leadership at Databricks.
15 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Github Skills (46)
unittesting10
unit-testing10
timeseries10
apache-spark10
content-management-system10
integrationtesting10
maintenance10
python10
testing10
dataframes10
pandas10
css10
big-data10
data-serialization10
spark-streaming10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
apache/spark-website
Jul 2014 - Oct 2018
Apache Spark Website
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:70 commits, 5 PRs, 15 comments in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Reynold primarily focused on updating the Apache Spark website, particularly the download and community pages. They fixed broken links, added sort benchmark news items, and updated the documentation links. They also updated the website's content, including FAQs, documentation, and related projects. These changes suggest involvement in both front-end and back-end website maintenance and content updates.
pythonsqlapachebig-dataspark
mesos/spark
Mar 2012 - Dec 2013
Lightning-fast cluster computing in Java, Scala and Python.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:298 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Reynold's commits primarily revolve around enhancements and modifications to the Spark codebase. The user added a feature to specify the serializer for closures via the `spark.closure.serializer` configuration option and subsequently integrated this serializer into the `SparkEnv` and executor task processing. Furthermore, the user implemented changes to the storage layer, including the introduction of a `DiskBlockObjectWriter` for writing shuffle output data and the ability for a worker to inform the master about block removal, indicating contributions focused on data processing and system performance.
pythoncluster-computinglightningsparkscala
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