Matt Spilchen
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Cockroach Labs
Stratford, Prince Edward Island, Canada
Summary
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RockstarMatt Spilchen is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and seasoned architect with over 20 years' experience building large-scale distributed database systems, now contributing at Cockroach Labs from Stratford, PEI. He specializes in backend and database engineering—notably contributing to CockroachDB’s SQL and schema-change internals, composite types, foreign key support over computed columns, and row-level security. Known for quickly mastering large codebases and new technologies, he combines pragmatic, well-tested code with strong collaborative code review and user-focused problem solving. Though based in Canada, his work impacts cloud-native databases used globally, reflecting both deep technical rigor and an aptitude for shipping reliable, scalable systems.
8 years of coding experience
Github Skills (6)
databases10
go10
distributed-database10
sql10
database-design10
database10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
May 2024 - Apr 2025
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:443 reviews, 377 PRs, 188 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributed to the back-end aspects of CockroachDB, with a focus on SQL and database-related features. Their work included implementing features for displaying and handling composite types, fixing bugs in schema change operations, and supporting the creation of foreign keys over stored computed columns. The user demonstrated expertise in SQL query optimization, database schema design, and distributed database internals. Additionally, they worked on improving the core aspects of the database by implementing or improving the database's support for features like row-level security.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
spilchen/community-operators
Nov 2021 - May 2024
The canonical source for Kubernetes Operators that are published on OperatorHub.io and part of the default catalog of the Operator Lifecycle Manager.
Contributions:70 pushes, 30 branches in 2 years 6 months
kubernetes-operatorsoperator-sdklifecycleoperator-lifecycle-manageroperator
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