Lara Araujo is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance backend systems, currently leading engineering work at Airbnb in Cambridge. She holds both BS and MS degrees in EECS from MIT and has progressed through roles at Airbnb from intern to staff engineer, demonstrating sustained impact on large-scale production services. Lara is an active open-source contributor to high-profile data systems like ReadySet and Noria, where she focused on caching layers, incremental updates, and web-module integrations to improve query performance and memory use. Known for digging into system internals, she blends production engineering with research-grade thinking to optimize distributed dataflows and SQL predicate handling. Colleagues describe her as a pragmatic problem-solver who surfaces subtle performance improvements that scale across teams.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Readyset is a MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer that sits in front of existing databases to speed up queries and horizontally scale read throughput. Under the hood, ReadySet caches the results of cached select statements and incrementally updates these results over time as the underlying data changes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:218 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Lara primarily focused on the development of backend components, particularly within the context of a caching layer. The commits showcase work on various aspects of the system, including web module fixes and enhancements to the filter operation. Furthermore, the user contributed to optimizing memory usage and correctly handling nested SQL queries and improved predicate ordering, indicating a deep understanding of the system's internal workings.
Fast web applications through dynamic, partially-stateful dataflow
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:334 commits, 27 PRs, 218 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Lara focused on fixing and implementing features related to the web module, including bug fixes for the web framework. They added functionality to expose the `FlowGraph` over HTTP and implemented PUT and GET endpoints for data access. The user also implemented a basic benchmark for a Piazza application, and performed tasks such as group universe creation and adding functionality to improve code.
web-applicationsdataflowstateful
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