Damien Katz
Software Engineer at PlanetScale
California, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorDamien Katz is a seasoned software engineer and distributed systems expert with over a decade of experience designing and shipping highly reliable database and storage systems. A principal creator of Apache CouchDB and former CTO/chief architect at Couchbase, he has driven large-scale projects at MySQL, AWS Aurora, Salesforce and multiple startups, often diving into C, C++, Erlang and Rust to fix critical issues himself. Damien specializes in connection handling, replication and storage engines, and has a track record of simple, unorthodox solutions that scale in production. He pairs deep system-level expertise with strong communication and product instincts—having led teams, written widely read technical posts, and even built a startup around CouchDB. Based in California, he also tinkers outside software (remodeled a kitchen, rebuilt a porch) and once authored a high-performance MySQL connection handler now published on GitHub.
10 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (13)
c999
ssl8
search-engine8
crypto8
database8
encryption8
cryptography8
rocksdb7
rust7
nodejs6
noise2
javascript1
browser1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
Damienkatz/thread_pool_hybrid
Feb 2025 - Aug 2025
Contributions:79 pushes, 7 branches in 5 months
Damienkatz/thread_pool_hybrid_benchmark
May 2025 - Jul 2025
Contributions:21 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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