Cory Grinstead
Senior Software Engineer at Eventual
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCory Grinstead is a Senior Software Engineer with nine years of experience building high-performance data systems and tooling, currently based in Minneapolis and working at Eventual. He specializes in Rust back-end development, contributing to performance-critical open-source projects like simd-json and Polars where he implemented SQL features and SIMD optimizations. Cory blends data engineering and ML-focused retrieval work—helping LanceDB integrate OpenAI embeddings and sentence transformers—demonstrating a knack for turning research-grade models into production-friendly components. His career spans startups and enterprise teams (Nike, John Deere) where he consistently improves data pipelines, serialization, and platform integrations. Notably, he pairs low-level, architecture-specific optimizations with pragmatic product improvements, and started his formal training at Hack Reactor.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Advanced Software Engineering Immersive Program, Advanced Software Engineering Immersive Program at Hack Reactor
Stackoverflow
571reputation
28kreached
20answers
10questions
Github Skills (31)
json10
sentence-transformers10
data-manipulation10
machine-learning10
approximate-nearest-neighbor-search10
vector-database10
polar10
x8610
sql10
polars10
x86-6410
simd10
rust10
apidoc9
crate9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
lancedb/lancedb
Jun 2023 - Aug 2024
Developer-friendly, embedded retrieval engine for multimodal AI. Search More; Manage Less.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & ML Engineer
Back-end Developer & ML EngineerContributions:58 reviews, 69 PRs, 35 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Cory primarily focused on enhancing the LanceDB backend, contributing to the embedded retrieval engine for multimodal AI. Their work involved improving the Rust embedding registry, enabling the use of OpenAI embedding functions, and integrating sentence transformers. They also addressed clippy warnings, indicating a focus on code quality and Rust-based backend development, along with improvements to nodejs integrations.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchimage-searchnearest-neighbor-searchrecommender-systemsearch-engine
pola-rs/polars
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:80 reviews, 101 commits, 205 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Cory primarily focused on back-end development tasks, with a clear emphasis on data manipulation and the implementation of SQL features. Their contributions included adding support for functions like `UNNEST`, `EXCLUDE`, and `CASE` expressions, and implementing table functions (e.g. `read_csv`). They also worked on optimizations, serialization, and deserialization functionalities related to the project's data structures, enhancing the project's data handling capabilities. Their changes were mainly within the core and SQL modules of the project.
polarsdataframespythondataframerust
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