Grant Nicholas
Staff Software Engineer at Starburst
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGrant Nicholas is a Staff Software Engineer based in Chicago with seven years of experience building low-latency, large-scale data and streaming systems. He has driven end-to-end platforms for Starburst and SpotHero—designing Kafka-to-Iceberg ingestion pipelines, real-time enrichment services, and Trino/Starburst connector work that touches both open-source Trino and commercial cloud products. Comfortable across JVM languages, Spark, Kafka Streams, and distributed SQL engines, he pairs hands-on backend engineering with product-minded automation like job scheduling and data maintenance. An active contributor to the Trino project, he has improved SPI features and database connector behavior for widely used systems such as Postgres, MySQL, SQLServer and ClickHouse. Collected experience from startups to enterprise and a dual CS/biomedical engineering degree gives him a pragmatic, systems-first perspective and a knack for turning complex data flow problems into reliable production services.
7 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science && Biomedical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science && Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (12)
query-engine10
javas10
query-builder10
sql10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
java10
database10
analytics9
jdbc9
databases9
big-data8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
trinodb/trino
Dec 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:208 reviews, 2 commits, 45 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Grant primarily contributed to enhancing the Trino SQL query engine. Their work involved adding new features to the SPI (Service Provider Interface), such as adding execution time to the QueryStatistics class. They also refactored and moved existing logic related to aggregate functions within the JDBC modules. Furthermore, the user addressed specific database connector integrations like Oracle, Postgresql, SQLServer, MySQL, and Clickhouse by implementing avg(bigint) logic and adding lockTimeout to sqlserver tests.
prestodbdbmsindexingjdbcbigdata
grantatspothero/trino
Nov 2021 - May 2024
Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)
Contributions:258 pushes, 45 branches in 2 years 7 months
hbasebigdatabig-datatrinodatabase
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