Josh Imhoff
Site Reliability Engineer at Cockroach Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJosh Imhoff is a Site Reliability Engineer with 11 years of experience building and maintaining resilient distributed systems in production, currently at Cockroach Labs after prior SRE work at Google. He focuses on backend and database reliability, contributing significant fixes to CockroachDB and the Pebble key-value store around observability, memory management, IO tracing, and write-stall diagnostics. Josh pairs pragmatism with deep systems knowledge—he’s debugged subtle pgwire memory leaks, improved tracing for meta2 scans, and enhanced LSM visualization to make low-level behavior more understandable. Based in New York and trained in computer science at Bowdoin College, he enjoys keeping “silly computers in line” by turning tricky, low-level failures into durable, measurable improvements.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Bowdoin College
Github Skills (22)
key-value-database10
key-value-store10
cockroachdb10
key-value10
databases10
go10
performance-optimization10
optimisation10
performance-tuning10
error-handling10
distributed-database10
database10
optimization10
debug9
performance-analytics9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Feb 2021 - 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:93 reviews, 10 commits, 32 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the CockroachDB backend, focusing on improving observability and memory management. Their work included tracing meta2 scans for improved error reporting and fixing a memory leak issue within the pgwire component. Additionally, the user addressed write stall issues by integrating pebble event logs and contributed to kvprober, improving its reliability and error handling, demonstrating a deep understanding of the database's inner workings.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
cockroachdb/pebble
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
RocksDB/LevelDB inspired key-value database in Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 3 commits, 34 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Josh primarily contributed to the `pebble` key-value database project, focusing on enhancing the functionality of the tools and improving system behavior. They implemented pretty-printed keys in the LSM visualization tool, ensuring that keys were displayed more clearly. Furthermore, the user added the size of write operations to disk health monitoring and fixed a buglet related to IO traces and offset settings. The contributions indicate a focus on debugging and performance improvements.
golangrocksdbtransactionalnosql-databasedatastore
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