Almog Gavra
Co-Founder at Responsive
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlmog 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
731reputation
137kreached
19answers
2questions
Github Skills (21)
apache-calcite10
apache-pinot10
kafka10
calc10
java10
scala10
javas10
sql10
streams-api10
serialization9
data-serialization9
configuration-management9
query-optimization9
jtest9
junit9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
apache/pinot
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Apache Pinot - A realtime distributed OLAP datastore
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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.
apache-pinotolapjava
apache/kafka
Mar 2019 - Apr 2025
Apache Kafka - A distributed event streaming platform
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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-kafkascalakafkajavastreaming
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