Jeff Davis
Sr. Staff Engineer at PostgreSQL Global Development Group
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeff Davis is a Sr. Staff Engineer based in California with 13 years of deep experience designing and optimizing database systems and distributed SQL. He has held senior engineering roles at Databricks, AWS, and Microsoft, and contributed to PostgreSQL since 2005, demonstrating long-term commitment to core database internals. His open-source work includes substantive patches to PostgreSQL and refactors for the Citus distributed PostgreSQL extension, showing expertise in WAL behavior, memory contexts, and FDW architecture. Jeff blends low-level systems thinking with production-scale distributed design—optimizing performance while improving code maintainability. Colleagues know him for tackling subtle database correctness and I/O efficiency issues that often go unnoticed until they matter at scale. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego and brings both academic rigor and pragmatic engineering to complex data infrastructure.
12 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San Diego
Github Skills (10)
c1710
databases10
postgresql10
wal10
c1110
back-end-development10
database10
performance-optimization9
database-design8
sql7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
citusdata/citus
Aug 2020 - Jun 2022
Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:346 reviews, 155 commits, 123 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Jeff refactored the FDW API to move code out of `cstore_fdw.c`, improving code organization and maintainability. They modified header files and included cleanup tasks to enhance the project's code base. The contributions also included creating a relfilenode for the FDW and optimizing database size calculations.
distributedrelational-databasesqlcitusscale
postgres/postgres
Jun 2013 - Jan 2023
Mirror of the official PostgreSQL GIT repository. Note that this is just a *mirror* - we don't work with pull requests on github. To contribute, please see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:181 commits in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily contributed to the PostgreSQL database, focusing on improvements to its core functionality. Their work included adding a buffer_std flag to the MarkBufferDirtyHint() function, renaming XLOG_HINT to XLOG_FPI, and introducing posix_fallocate() for new WAL files. They also made changes to the logic of the search_path and the memory context for HashAgg. These changes indicate a strong understanding of database internals and optimization techniques.
patchgit-repositorypull-requestspostgrespostgresql
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