Joshua Lockerman
Senior Software Engineer at Google
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Lockerman is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience building high-performance database systems and developer tooling, currently at Google after five years driving core features at TimescaleDB. He designed TimescaleDB’s columnar compression, materialized view maintenance, and SkipScan optimizations—each delivering orders-of-magnitude improvements in storage and query performance. Joshua combines deep systems and database expertise (PhD in distributed systems from Yale) with practical engineering: he’s contributed to pgx for Rust-based Postgres extensions and optimized Promscale’s ingestion path for high-throughput observability workloads. He leads teams focused on usability and expanding TimescaleDB’s applicability, blending research rigor with production-grade engineering. Notably, his work often targets subtle memory and IO bottlenecks, turning low-level fixes into large real-world wins.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Yale UniversityBachelor's degree, 3.9, Bachelor's degree, 3.9 at Yeshiva University
Stackoverflow
26reputation
447reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (18)
timeseries-database10
cargo10
postgresql10
memory-management10
time-series10
timescaledb10
go10
sql10
database-design10
performance-tuning10
rust10
cprogramming-language10
batch-processing10
database-optimization10
macros9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
timescale/timescaledb
Aug 2018 - Aug 2022
A time-series database for high-performance real-time analytics packaged as a Postgres extension
Role in this project:
Backend Developer / Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Backend Developer / Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:5 reviews, 232 commits, 219 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Joshua's commits focused on fixing issues within the TimescaleDB database extension. Their contributions primarily involved addressing memory management problems, such as fixing segfaults related to custom partitioning types by freeing expression contexts and ensuring proper memory context handling during chunk insert operations. Furthermore, the user worked on fixing issues related to the SubspaceStore, ensuring the `max_open_chunks_per_insert` setting was correctly applied. The user also improved the code base readability by refactoring array indexing operations.
postgresql-extensionfinancial-analysiscomplex-queriestime-seriestsdb
timescale/promscale
Mar 2020 - Nov 2020
[DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:186 reviews, 124 commits, 126 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Joshua's commits focused on improving the performance of the Promscale backend by optimizing the insert path. They implemented batching of writes at the IO level to store samples from multiple WriteReqs using a single database write. Furthermore, the user refactored the code to introduce a dedicated CopyFrom worker and switched to using array-based interchange instead of JSONB to improve efficiency. These changes involved modifications to the database interaction logic and the implementation of caching mechanisms, showing their focus on optimizing data ingestion and database performance.
promqlobservabilitypromscalegrafanaprometheus
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