Marco Slot
Principal Software Engineer at Snowflake
Haarlem, North Holland, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMarco Slot is a Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance distributed systems and PostgreSQL extensions, now working on Snowflake's Postgres efforts. He has led architecture and engineering across startups and hyperscalers—founding engineer at Citus Data, principal roles at Microsoft and Crunchy Data, and earlier infrastructure work at Amazon on CloudFront and Route 53. Marco combines deep database internals expertise (notably contributions to Citus, pg_cron and columnar cstore_fdw) with product and roadmap leadership, having shipped features that improve distributed query performance, scheduling, and storage. He holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in parallel and distributed systems, and his background includes research on cooperative self-driving car algorithms—an indicator of strong systems modelling skills beyond databases. Colleagues describe him as an engineer who prefers turning database internals into viable business products, blending rigorous R&D with practical operational improvements.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems, Master of Science (MS) Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin
Dutch, English
Github Skills (20)
cron10
postgresql10
compression-algorithm10
databases10
c1110
c1710
foreign-data-wrapper10
indices10
citus10
sql10
distributed-database10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
database10
database-design9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
citusdata/citus
Feb 2016 - Jan 2023
Distributed PostgreSQL as an extension
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:28 reviews, 755 commits, 1 PR in 7 years
Contributions summary:Marco contributed to enhancements for managing distributed tables and indexes within the Citus database extension, focusing on operations such as dropping shards and creating and maintaining the database structure for index operations. The commits demonstrate a focus on database administration by refactoring code, improving error handling, and ensuring that metadata is correctly managed for distributed queries. The user's work impacted core functionalities, including query performance and data integrity.
distributedrelational-databasesqlcitusscale
citusdata/pg_cron
Sep 2016 - Jul 2022
Run periodic jobs in PostgreSQL
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:2 releases, 19 reviews, 76 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Marco primarily contributed to the `pg_cron` PostgreSQL extension, focusing on bug fixes and feature enhancements related to job scheduling and management. They improved error handling for database connections, addressed compilation issues, and implemented features like `@reboot` schedule support. The user also worked on database schema modifications, including table and sequence updates, and security improvements related to job ownership and permissions.
schedulerperiodicpostgrescronpostgresql
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