Dimitri Fontaine
Systems Software Engineer at Neon
Paris, Ile-de-France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDimitri Fontaine is a systems software engineer and long-time PostgreSQL major contributor with 8+ years of focused experience building resilient, high-availability database services and tooling. He authored core PostgreSQL features (CREATE EXTENSION, event triggers) and created widely used OSS like pgloader, pgcopydb and pg_auto_failover, driving both product integrations at Microsoft/Azure and cloud deployments. Currently at Neon, he combines deep C/Python/SQL systems work with architectural leadership informed by roles from CTO to Principal Engineer. Dimitri also wrote The Art of PostgreSQL to teach practical, high-performance SQL to developers, reflecting his emphasis on teachable, production-ready solutions. Known for pragmatic refactors and replication expertise, he’s repeatedly turned database internals knowledge into reliable migration and HA tooling adopted across cloud providers. Based in Paris, he blends hands-on engineering with open-source stewardship that surfaces in both core engine patches and operational tooling.
8 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at ISTY - Institut des Sciences et Techniques des Yvelines
English, French
Github Skills (11)
database-management10
citus10
postgresql10
replication10
sql10
database-design10
distributed-database9
relational-databases9
database-administration9
testing8
go3
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
hapostgres/pg_auto_failover
May 2019 - Nov 2022
Postgres extension and service for automated failover and high-availability
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:13 releases, 550 reviews, 637 commits in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Dimitri primarily focused on refactoring and improving the pg_auto_failover project's codebase, specifically in relation to database management and performance. The user's commits included cleaning up code related to prepared transaction names and removing legacy code. The contributions also involved enhancing the code for handling replication slots and improving database connection management, including adding support for connection retries. The user demonstrated an understanding of database internals and replication concepts through their work.
availabilitypostgresql-extensionauto-failoverdockerpostgres
citusdata/citus
Jan 2018 - Dec 2018
Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Database Engineer
Backend Developer & Database EngineerContributions:11 commits, 9 PRs, 42 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Dimitri contributed significantly to the `citus` repository by implementing and enhancing database functionalities. Their work involved adding and modifying DDL tests, particularly focusing on non-public schema support, and implementing features like `ALTER TABLE ... RENAME TO ...` and `ALTER INDEX ... RENAME TO ...`. They also addressed storage parameters, and refactored code to improve the efficiency of the database.
distributedrelational-databasesqlcitusscale
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