Derek Downey
Vice President Of Customer Engineering at Distributed Database Administrators
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Downey is a seasoned database and customer engineering leader with 11 years of experience building and scaling open source database teams and remote-first operations. Currently Vice President of Customer Engineering at PlanetScale and CTO of DataRook, he blends hands-on MySQL/MongoDB expertise with strategic leadership in customer success and developer relations. Derek has led global managed services practices, driven automation and operational visibility initiatives, and helped cultivate the next generation of remote database administrators. A vocal advocate for RemoteWork and cloud-native adoption, he pairs technical depth—from capacity planning to containerized DevOps—with a talent for building distributed, diverse teams. Based in Knoxville, TN, he brings a practitioner’s curiosity and a history of translating complex database challenges into repeatable, scalable customer outcomes.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Computer Science, Bachelor Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
1,512reputation
178kreached
46answers
5questions
Github Skills (103)
reverse-proxy10
python10
high-availability10
proxy10
failover10
mysql-replication10
automation10
ssh10
mysql-proxy10
ansible10
high-performance10
mysql10
mariadb10
replication10
percona10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dtest/proxysql
Apr 2016 - Feb 2021
Contributions:3 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 10 months
dtest/plam16-proxysql
Aug 2016 - Jul 2020
Contributions:2 commits, 18 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 11 months
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.