Alfonso Marqués
Staff Software Engineer at Polar Signals
Spain
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlfonso Marqués is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance distributed systems and databases, currently shaping backend architecture at Polar Signals from Spain. He previously led performance and disk-infrastructure efforts at Cockroach Labs, delivering multi-fold query speedups and production-ready vectorized execution. An active open-source contributor, Alfonso has deep hands-on expertise in embeddable column stores (FrostDB) and continuous profiling tooling (Parca), where he implemented core features, query optimizations, and compaction strategies. He combines backend engineering with DevOps sensibilities—improving graceful shutdowns, deployments and schema configurations—to drive reliability at scale. Outside engineering, he invests as an angel and venture partner in data, devtools and infra startups, bringing founder-facing technical judgement to early-stage businesses.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Brown University
English, Spanish, French, Italian, German
Github Skills (26)
performance-monitor10
databases10
query-optimization10
apache-arrow10
go10
performance-analysis10
column-store10
data-profiling10
profiling10
profiler10
database10
observability9
parquet9
data-structures8
data-structure8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
polarsignals/frostdb
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
❄️ Coolest database around 🧊 Embeddable column database written in Go.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:271 reviews, 52 commits, 337 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Alfonso primarily contributed to the implementation of database features and query optimization within the FrostDB repository. Their work involved adding aggregate functions, specifically `max`, and optimizing distinct queries using column indexes within the `pqarrow` package. They also added end-to-end benchmarks and enhanced the system with a leveled compaction strategy, improving overall performance and memory usage. The contributions included writing code for new features and tests, and modifying existing files, demonstrating a focus on core database functionality.
golangembedded-databaseolapcolumnar-storagenosql-database
parca-dev/parca
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:21 reviews, 8 commits, 13 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Alfonso's contributions center on enhancing the Parca project's backend and deployment aspects. They updated the `frostdb` dependency to incorporate improvements and bug fixes. Furthermore, the user addressed server shutdown processes and optimized schema configurations to improve performance. Their work also involved updating versions for dependencies and configuration of the project's tooling, fixing build-related issues.
memorymemory-usageobservabilityprometheusmonitoring
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