Joel Lubinitsky is a Senior Software Engineer in the New York City area with seven years of experience building data platforms and back-end systems, now working at Netflix and active as a founder of BackDeck. He brings deep expertise in columnar data and Parquet integration through significant contributions and committer status on the high-profile Apache Arrow project, where he improved Go bindings, timestamp semantics, compression support, and FlightSQL session features. Joel’s career spans startups and scale-ups—co-founding Quarre, driving data platform reliability at Cherre, and a recent senior engineering stint at Voltron Data—demonstrating both product intuition and hands-on systems engineering. He holds an MEng in Computer Science from Cornell and a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Syracuse, a pairing that surfaces in his pragmatic, systems-oriented approach to complex data problems.
7 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science, Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science at Cornell University
Bachelor of Science - BS, Aerospace Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Aerospace Engineering at Syracuse University College of Engineering and Computer Science
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:138 reviews, 32 PRs, 12 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily worked on enhancing the Go implementation within the Apache Arrow project. Their contributions centered on improving Parquet integration by correctly mapping Arrow DATE64 types, ensuring consistent timestamp semantics, and adding support for the LZ4_RAW compression codec. Furthermore, they implemented session management features for FlightSQL, aligning the Go implementation with other language implementations. The user also addressed issues related to IPC writers and code refactoring to consolidate similar functionalities.
Database connectivity API standard and libraries for Apache Arrow
Contributions:104 pushes, 11 branches in 1 year 1 month
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Joel Lubinitsky - Senior Software Engineer at BackDeck