Alan Paxton
Lead Software Engineer at Neo4j
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Paxton is a Lead Software Engineer based in Edinburgh with 15+ years of experience designing and implementing high-performance distributed systems, databases and storage engines. He combines deep systems-level expertise—concurrency, pragmatic formal methods and index design—with hands-on mobile and cross-platform app development (Flutter, React Native, Kotlin, ObjC, Java). Currently contributing to core index features at Neo4j, he previously improved RocksDB’s Java API and eXist-db’s XQuery engine, surfacing a strong open-source track record on widely used projects. Alan favors architecture, specification and platform integration work, bridging low-level robustness with pragmatic service and API design. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh and a background that ranges from transactional quorum algorithms to modern mobile audio and AWS-backed services. Colleagues describe him as a problem solver who enjoys digging into subtle performance and memory issues that most engineers avoid.
15 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at The University of Edinburgh
Stackoverflow
26reputation
639reached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (20)
back-end-development10
xquery10
rocksdb10
java10
javas10
jna10
performance-optimization10
xml10
xml-database10
testing9
admin9
database-administration9
databases9
database9
xpath9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
eXist-db/exist
Apr 2022 - Sep 2022
eXist Native XML Database and Application Platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 reviews, 125 commits, 12 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the eXist-db native XML database, focusing on enhancing the XQuery engine. Their work involved implementing the `fn:default-language` function, refactoring date formatting functions, and developing test cases. The user's changes show a strong understanding of XQuery syntax and the core functionality of the database.
nosqlxml-databasexmlxprocxquery
facebook/rocksdb
Dec 2021 - Dec 2022
A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:56 reviews, 19 commits, 60 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to improving the RocksDB Java API, focusing on performance optimization and feature enhancements. They implemented support for indirect byte buffers in iterators, refactored multiGet operations for efficiency, and addressed memory leaks related to native references. Furthermore, they added new checksum types and fixed issues related to handling column family handles, ensuring consistent API behavior. The user also worked on implementing the missing compact range options and ensuring the robustness of the database operations.
persistent-storagebigtablefast-storagelsm-treedatabase
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