Avi Kivity
CTO, Cofounder at ScyllaDB
Herzliya, Tel Aviv District, Israel
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAvi Kivity is a seasoned systems engineer and entrepreneur with 26 years of experience building high-performance infrastructure, currently serving as CTO and cofounder of ScyllaDB and author of the Seastar C++ I/O framework. He combines deep kernel and x86 expertise—fluent in C/C++, x86 assembly, Java and Python—with a track record as KVM maintainer at Red Hat and as a leading developer of virtualization and storage systems. His work spans Linux kernel internals, low-latency I/O, clustering and distributed storage, enabling ScyllaDB to deliver million-op-per-second throughput with low latency. An active open-source contributor, Avi’s commits touch both hypervisor-level MMU and VMX refinements in KVM and low-level datastore and Seastar optimizations in ScyllaDB. He is based in Herzliya, Israel, and is known for turning deep systems knowledge into production-grade, scalable software rather than academic abstractions. Beyond leadership, he still ships low-level patches that improve reliability and performance across virtualization and database stacks.
26 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
English
Stackoverflow
1,382reputation
21kreached
23answers
8questions
cassandra
top-5%
Github Skills (33)
asynchronous10
kvm10
c-language10
async10
c1110
data-structure10
x8610
c1710
virtualization10
data-structures10
cprogramming-language10
system-programming9
cassandra9
assembly9
interrupt-handling9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
scylladb/scylladb
Dec 2014 - Jan 2023
NoSQL data store using the Seastar framework, compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:7562 reviews, 5560 commits, 1095 PRs in 8 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Avi primarily contributed to low-level data store functionality, involving changes to the maintenance of the connection. The first commit introduces modifications to the file system permissions for the maintenance socket, indicating involvement in system-level processes. Subsequent commits involve modifying the handling of key-value pairs, including changes to primary and clustering key structure. The commits cover different types of system operation and functionality.
cppnosqlseastarcassandrasql
scylladb/seastar
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
High performance server-side application framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:844 reviews, 2056 commits, 604 PRs in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Avi focused on improving the internal workings of the Seastar framework, making the core components more efficient. Their contributions involve optimizing the future_state non-variadic implementation by adding aliases and static asserts to improve compile-time checks. The work also included enhancing logging through the use of the {fmt} library and refining the handling and printing of exceptions within the system.
seastarc-plus-plusdpdkframeworkperformance
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