Irfan Sharif
Member Of Technical Staff at Arcol
Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIrfan Sharif is a backend and database engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance, distributed systems and infrastructure. He made substantial contributions to CockroachDB’s core storage and KV layer—fixing race conditions, reducing contention, and improving replication and admission control to boost stability and throughput. His internships spanned ML infrastructure at LinkedIn, search relevance at A9, and production engineering at Shopify, showing a consistent focus on performance, scalability, and practical system design. More recently he’s been a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs, Modal Labs, Arcol and currently works with Cursor, blending deep systems expertise with product-minded implementation. He pairs rigorous, formal approaches (TLA+ proofs and RFCs) with hands-on optimizations like RPC and garbage-collection work, which frequently deliver measurable latency and throughput gains. Based in Canada, he’s an open-source contributor who prefers tackling concurrency and storage internals over front-end glamor.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
GCE A-Levels: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, GCE A-Levels: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Economics at St. Mary's Catholic HighBachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (10)
access-control10
databases10
go10
concurrent10
replication10
admin10
performance-optimization10
concurrency10
database10
testing9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Sep 2016 - Jan 2023
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:1308 reviews, 800 commits, 802 PRs in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Irfan primarily contributed to the CockroachDB database, focusing on the performance and maintainability of the KV storage layer. Their work included addressing performance regressions, improving internal data structures, refactoring code to avoid contention, and adding mechanisms for replication control. The commits reveal involvement in the core storage components and admission control features, which required a deep understanding of database internals and concurrency control. They were responsible for fixing race conditions and improving the stability of the database.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
irfansharif/cockroach
Aug 2016 - Oct 2023
A Scalable, Survivable, Strongly-Consistent SQL Database
Contributions:7 PRs, 2190 pushes, 1222 branches in 7 years 3 months
scalablemysqlsql-databasesqlconsistent
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