Jonathan Ellis
Founder at Brokk, Inc.
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inDistributed Data Systems and Analytics Technology
Jonathan Ellis is a seasoned software leader and founder with 17 years building distributed systems, databases, and developer tools from the trenches to the boardroom. As founder of Brokk he’s applying compiler-grade code understanding to keep LLMs on-task in million-line codebases, drawing on deep systems experience from co-founding and leading product at DataStax for 15 years. He led engineering contributions to Apache Cassandra and shipping features like Paxos, scaled streaming and cloud services, and has hands-on optimization chops evidenced by Lucene contributions that improved HNSW performance. Based in Austin, he blends executive leadership with low-level engineering—he’s equally comfortable authoring core algorithms, refactoring for perf, and building go-to-market products. An intellectually curious practitioner, he has a track record of turning distributed-systems theory into high-impact, production-grade software.
17 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Brigham Young University
French, Tagalog
Stackoverflow
19,367reputation
1.0mreached
447answers
2questions
mysql
top-5%
hadoop
top-1%
mongodb
top-5%
cassandra
top-1%
migration
top-5%
nosql
top-1%
Github Skills (27)
algorithm10
algorithms10
search-engine10
nosql10
cassandra10
information-retrieval10
hadoop10
data-structure10
hashmap10
java10
javas10
performance-optimization10
data-structures10
mysql9
migration9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Apr 2023 - Feb 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 11 PRs, 82 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily focused on optimizing the Apache Lucene search software, specifically related to its HNSW graph implementation for approximate nearest neighbor search. Their contributions involved refactoring code to utilize `HashMap` instead of `TreeMap`, which improved performance, and included adding checks for valid vectors and reusing neighbor queues to further increase efficiency during index building. They also contributed to the codebase by including bitset operations and making code improvements in the Lucene95 and Lucene94 vector writers.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
apache/cassandra
Mar 2009 - Jul 2016
Apache Cassandra®
Contributions:29 reviews, 6505 commits, 12 PRs in 7 years 5 months
cassandraosgiapacheslingdatabase
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