Almog Gavra - Co-Founder at Responsive

Almog Gavra

Co-Founder at Responsive

Mountain View, California, United States

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Almog Gavra is a seasoned distributed-systems engineer and co-founder based in Mountain View with 11 years of experience building low-latency streaming databases and search infrastructure. He co-founded Responsive to simplify running Kafka Streams at scale and previously led technical efforts at Confluent and StarTree, where he improved ksqlDB and Apache Pinot performance and concurrency. Almog combines hands-on systems design—shipping upgrades-without-downtime, multi-way joins, and threading models for cooperative scheduling—with people leadership and product ownership. He is an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects such as Apache Kafka and Apache Pinot, adding SQL compiler support, store abstractions, and fixes that prevent serialization and join issues. Not obvious from titles: he repeatedly focuses on solving tail-latency and operational pain points, often by rethinking execution and storage abstractions rather than just patching symptoms. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Cornell and prefers tackling the hard distributed-data problems teams typically defer.

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 Cornell University

English, Hebrew, Spanish

Stackoverflow

Stats

731reputation

137kreached

19answers

2questions

Github Skills (21)

apache-calcite10

apache-pinot10

kafka10

java10

calc10

scala10

javas10

sql10

streams-api10

serialization9

data-serialization9

configuration-management9

query-optimization9

jtest9

junit9

Programming languages (7)

TypeScriptJavaShellRustHTMLGroovyPython

Github contributions (5)

apache/pinot

Sep 2022 - Jan 2023

Apache Pinot - A realtime distributed OLAP datastore

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:231 reviews, 41 commits, 58 PRs in 3 months

Contributions summary:Almog contributed to the Apache Pinot project by implementing new features and improving existing functionalities within the back-end system. Their work focused on parsing and integrating the "AT TIME ZONE" expression into the SQL compiler, which involved modifying existing parser components, adding custom Calcite extensions, and writing related unit tests. The user also added a debug string to the query plan, which improved the explain plan, and addressed limitations related to LIMIT/OFFSET queries. They also fixed the aggregation logic.

realtimedata-streamolapapachedatastore

apache/kafka

Mar 2019 - Apr 2025

Mirror of Apache Kafka

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:49 reviews, 17 PRs, 100 comments in 6 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Almog primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Apache Kafka codebase. Their contributions involved introducing and integrating a `StoreFactory` abstraction to manage store configurations, improving the handling of windowed and session stores. The user also fixed stream-stream-join store types and outer joins, preventing serialization errors. Furthermore, they made several code modifications and documentation updates related to KIP-954 and the configuration of DSL store suppliers.

apache-kafkakafka-consumerapachescalakafka

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