Alexey Kondratov is a Lead Software Engineer based in Berlin with 12 years of experience building and architecting distributed databases and backend systems. He brought Neon’s serverless Postgres from concept to production-grade features—contributing to core components like zenith and pageserver and improving branching, error handling, and low-level database structures. Before Neon he worked on PostgreSQL core features at Postgres Professional (pg_rewind, ptrack, sharding and logical replication), and now continues to push further separation of compute and storage at Databricks. Trained as a theoretical physicist with a PhD in condensed matter, he blends rigorous analytical thinking and numerical simulation experience with hands-on systems engineering. He’s comfortable across languages and domains—from low-level DB internals and performance-critical Rust/C work to Python-driven research tooling—and has a track record of turning academic complexity into production software. An often-unexpected asset is his background in optics and signal processing, which informs a methodical approach to debugging, modeling, and designing robust systems.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Condensed Matter and Materials Physics at Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IC RAS)
Master's Degree Applied Mathematics and Physics, Master's Degree Applied Mathematics and Physics at National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute)
Neon: Serverless Postgres. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, code-like database branching, and scale to zero.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Contributions:603 reviews, 60 commits, 175 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Alexey primarily focused on back-end development tasks within the Neon serverless Postgres repository, specifically contributing to the `zenith` and `pageserver` components. Their contributions include refactoring error handling, implementing branching output functionalities, and enhancing the branches tree drawing routines. They also worked on database-related tasks by adding and modifying data structures like `RelTag` and `BufferTag`, and by updating and implementing various database functionalities like the create, rename, and deletion of databases and roles. These contributions indicate a strong focus on improving core database features and functionalities.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Alexey Kondratov - Lead Software Engineer at Databricks