David Stryker
Staff Engineer at Starburst
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Stryker is a staff engineer based in Palo Alto with a long track record of turning cutting-edge ideas into production-grade, high-performance systems across startups and large enterprises. He has deep expertise in distributed query engines and data format internals, demonstrated by significant contributions to the Trino project—particularly enhancing Iceberg integration and fixing complex ORC/TYPE issues. At Starburst he helped found the Galaxy SaaS analytics platform and implemented super-scalable role-based access control and SQL MERGE support, showing both product and infrastructure chops. His career spans platform architecture, large-scale storage and telemetry systems, and developer-facing services dating back to early roles at Netscape and Symbolics, reflecting rare institutional memory. Colleagues would describe him as a pragmatic architect who prefers shipping durable solutions over academic purity, and who routinely moves technology from lab prototypes into resilient production. He pairs a physics and mathematics background with hands-on engineering, enabling clear thinking about performance, consistency, and system design trade-offs.
5 years of coding experience
40 years of employment as a software developer
Bs, Physics and Mathematics, Bs, Physics and Mathematics at University of Maryland
Github Skills (11)
ice10
data-storage10
javas10
query-engine10
query-builder10
sql10
orc10
java10
apache-iceberg10
parquet9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
trinodb/trino
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:813 reviews, 23 commits, 81 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:David's contributions center on enhancing the Iceberg integration within the Trino distributed SQL query engine. They implemented unit tests and functionality for Iceberg table creation and manipulation, including support for CREATE TABLE LIKE, comments, and rollback to a previous snapshot. Furthermore, they fixed several bugs related to ORC timestamp and decimal types, and implemented support for the TIME type, demonstrating significant expertise in data format handling and query engine internals. These changes included core code modifications, impacting several modules like metadata, page source, and expression conversion.
prestodbdbmsindexingjdbcbigdata
djsstarburst/trino
Jun 2020 - Mar 2025
Home of the community managed version of Presto, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, under the auspices of the Presto Software Foundation.
Contributions:1086 pushes, 154 branches in 4 years 10 months
queryhivequery-enginesqlbig-data
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