Lev Kokotov
Founder at PgDog
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLev Kokotov is a founder and full-stack software engineer with a decade of experience building scalable data-intensive systems and ML infrastructure from San Francisco. He has led product and engineering at startups and enterprise teams—most recently founding PgDog and previously serving as Founder & CTO of PostgresML—combining hands-on backend engineering with system architecture and DevOps. Lev’s open-source contributions include core work on PostgresML (GPU-enabled Postgres for ML) and pgcat (a sharding and failover Postgres pooler), reflecting deep expertise in Postgres internals, ML model deployment, and high-performance networking. At Instacart he scaled search by 10x via a sharded Postgres cluster and built in-house feature-store and traffic-mirroring proxies, showing a pattern of solving hard infra problems with pragmatic engineering. He pairs broad language and systems experience (C/C++, Python, Go, React, Terraform, Ansible) with a founder’s product sensibility and an uncommon focus on bringing ML workflows into the database.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at Concordia UniversityDiplôme d'études collégiales Law & Society, Diplôme d'études collégiales Law & Society at Dawson CollegeBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Political Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Political Science Computer Science at McGill University
French, Russian, Spanish, English
Github Skills (37)
xgboost10
postgresql10
python10
back-end-development10
scikit10
machine-learning10
networking10
sql10
scikit-learn10
rust10
concurrency10
api-design9
restful-api9
data-science9
testing9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
postgresml/pgcat
Feb 2022 - Jan 2023
PostgreSQL pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover support.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 releases, 309 reviews, 227 commits in 11 months
Contributions summary:Lev contributed to the development of a PostgreSQL connection pooler with sharding and failover support. Their commits focused on implementing core features, including client-server communication, authentication, and query handling. The user also worked on setting up and configuring the test environment and refactoring and improving the project. This included enhancements for handling TLS connections, automatic sharding, and dynamic configuration reloading.
poolingrustshardingload-balancingpostgres
postgresml/postgresml
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
Postgres with GPUs for ML/AI apps.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & ML Engineer
Back-end Developer & ML EngineerContributions:23 releases, 323 reviews, 329 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Lev primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the PostgresML project, focusing on machine learning model training, deployment, and prediction capabilities. They implemented new features, including model training using Python and XGBoost, as well as integrating support for various machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, they were involved in database schema modifications and integrating the models into the existing dashboard interface.
pythonhuggingface-transformerslanguage-modelend-to-enddata-science
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