Andrew Kimball
Director Of Engineering at Cockroach Labs
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarAndrew Kimball is a seasoned engineering leader with over two decades of experience delivering large-scale distributed systems and cloud databases, currently serving as Director of Engineering at Cockroach Labs in San Francisco. He led the teams that built CockroachDB Serverless and the storage engine and cost-based SQL optimizer, and has hands-on experience contributing core backend changes to CockroachDB—most notably improving tenant cost modeling and eCPU accounting for accurate resource control. Prior roles include scaling Square Capital from a tiny pilot into a billion-dollar lending business and building cloud database components at Microsoft, where he helped ship parts of SQL Azure. Comfortable switching between strategy, people leadership, product design, and deep engineering, he often rolls up his sleeves to write production code and design algorithms. Notably, his work blends product-facing features (serverless, pay-as-you-go pricing) with low-level systems engineering (KV-layer CPU modeling), reflecting a rare mix of business and technical ownership. Based in the Bay Area, he pairs startup agility with enterprise-scale execution and a track record of turning research-grade ideas into production systems.
8 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (14)
performance-tuning10
databases10
performance-analytics10
go10
performance-analysis10
performance-monitor10
performance-monitoring10
distributed-database10
sql10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
metric10
performance-measurement10
database10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Jan 2018 - Jul 2022
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:263 reviews, 590 commits, 473 PRs in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Andrew implemented and modified the tenant cost model, focusing on accurately accounting for resources consumed by tenant operations within the CockroachDB database. They updated the cost model to consider both read and write requests, along with batches. The user added support for the eCPU model, which estimates KV-layer CPU usage based on read/write requests, converting those estimates into tokens for resource control, and incorporated background CPU usage into the eCPU model, for more accurate cost estimation. These changes included the introduction of new settings, metrics and methods, indicating significant contributions to the core database functionality.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
andy-kimball/cockroach
Jan 2018 - Apr 2025
CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native SQL database.
Contributions:1422 pushes, 682 branches in 7 years 3 months
sqlservermysqlsql-databasesqlcockroachdb
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