Dana Van Aken - Head Of Research at Altimate AI

Dana Van Aken

Head Of Research at Altimate AI

Seattle, Washington, United States

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Dana Van Aken is a research-driven technology leader with 11 years of experience building database and backend systems, currently heading research at Altimate AI. She co-founded and served as CTO of OtterTune, applying her Ph.D. training from Carnegie Mellon to automate DBMS configuration and productionize self-driving database ideas. Her open-source contributions include backend work on high-profile projects like OtterTune and Peloton, adding metrics, transaction statistics, and admin tooling to improve performance and observability. Dana combines academic rigor with startup execution—moving features from prototype to scalable deployments while improving admin UX and benchmark tooling. Based in Seattle, she blends systems-level engineering, database benchmarking expertise, and product instincts informed by prior internships at Microsoft and Google. An uncommon strength is her fluency across research, product, and low-level DB internals, enabling practical innovations that measurably boost throughput and manageability.

11 years of coding experience

10 years of employment as a software developer

B.S. Computer Engineering, B.S. Computer Engineering at University of Washington

B.A. Business Finance, B.A. Business Finance at Western Washington University

Ph.D. Computer Science, Ph.D. Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

Github Skills (28)

transaction10

benchmark10

c-language10

postgresql10

admin10

back-end-development10

python10

django10

databases10

benchmarking10

database-administration10

java10

javas10

transactionscope10

sql10

Programming languages (3)

JavaC++Python

Github contributions (5)

cmu-db/ottertune

Aug 2019 - Jul 2020

The automatic DBMS configuration tool

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:141 commits, 288 PRs, 218 pushes in 11 months

Contributions summary:Dana primarily contributed to the website's back-end functionality, with a focus on improving the Django admin interface for managing database models. Their commits involved enhancing the admin panel's features, such as faster loading times and better functionality for models with foreign keys. They also addressed bugs and made improvements to the database parsing logic and contributed to the addition of features like execution time logging.

dbmsmysqldatabase-accessdbtdatabase

oltpbenchmark/oltpbench

Jan 2015 - Nov 2019

Database Benchmarking Framework

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer / Database Engineer

Contributions:135 commits, 30 PRs, 101 pushes in 4 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Dana primarily focused on enhancing the database benchmarking framework, `oltpbench`. Their contributions included adding the database version to summary output files and implementing database parameter collection for MySQL and PostgreSQL. They also fixed issues with benchmark loaders for the SmallBank, SI, and Voter benchmarks. Further, they updated DDL files for the ResourceStresser and YCSB benchmarks.

benchmarkingbenchmarkbenchmarksdatabasebenchmarking-framework

Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.

Request Free Trial