Russell Spitzer

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

Russell Spitzer is a Principal Engineer at Snowflake and an Apache Iceberg committer and PMC member based in New Orleans, bringing 11 years of experience building and optimizing distributed data systems. He previously led engineering at Apple and spent years at DataStax working on Spark/Cassandra integration and massive test automation for thousands of instances. As an active contributor to Apache Iceberg and Apache Spark, he’s implemented features around snapshot management, rewrite-data-file actions, predicate pushdown, and PySpark session extension fixes that improve query planning and data management across engines like Spark, Trino, and Flink. His unusual path from a PhD in bioinformatics to production distributed systems gives him a strong experimental mindset for performance and correctness at scale. Outside of work he’s a dog lover who, by his own admission, thinks about distributed systems a lot.

12 years of coding experience

Github Skills (24)

spark10

back-end-development10

cassandra10

testing10

query-optimization10

big-data10

data-management10

java10

scala210

scala10

javas10

sql10

apache-iceberg10

data-engineering9

data-pipelines9

Programming languages (8)

TypeScriptJavaScalaSCSSJavaScriptGoThriftPython

Github contributions (5)

apache/cassandra-spark-connector

Jul 2014 - Jun 2020

DataStax Connector for Apache Spark to Apache Cassandra

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:18 releases, 18 reviews, 1010 commits in 5 years 11 months

Contributions summary:Russell primarily contributed to the DataStax Connector for Apache Spark to Apache Cassandra, a project focused on integrating Spark with Cassandra. Their commits demonstrate involvement in enhancing SQL functionality, specifically related to predicate pushdown and join operations within the connector. The user addressed bugs and improved code related to timeuuid comparisons and various types of filter pushdown.

cassandraconnectorsparkscaladatastax

apache/iceberg

Jul 2020 - Jan 2023

Apache Iceberg

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:2 releases, 4020 reviews, 81 commits in 2 years 6 months

Contributions summary:Russell primarily contributed to the Apache Iceberg codebase by implementing and testing features related to data management and query optimization. Their commits focused on improving the `RemoveSnapshots` functionality, fixing a whitespace issue in Spark, and enabling the `cleanExpiredFiles` option in `ExpireSnapshots`. The user also contributed to the inclusion of a new action called `RewriteDataFilesAction`. This involved significant modifications to core Iceberg components, illustrating a deep understanding of the project's underlying architecture and internal APIs.

apache-icebergapachebig-datadatastreamjava

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