Matt Topol
Co-Founder at Apache Iceberg
Norwalk, Connecticut, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Topol is a software engineer and co-founder with 11+ years building high-performance distributed systems, particularly in financial analytics and columnar data processing. He specializes in Go, C/C++, Python, and low-level systems on Linux/OpenVMS, and has led engineering teams from core middleware to large-scale service architectures. Matt is a long-standing Apache Arrow committer and PMC member who has driven critical improvements in array handling, Parquet support, and zero-copy GPU interoperability—work that underpins fast in-memory analytics across languages. Recently he moved to work full-time on Arrow-related ecosystems and now co-leads Columnar while also serving in Apache Iceberg governance. Based in Connecticut, he pairs pragmatic engineering with an open-source community mindset and a knack for obsessing over memory and performance details others often overlook. Outside work he enjoys crafting delightfully demented fantasy games and evangelizing technical ideas with infectious energy.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at New York University - Polytechnic School of Engineering
Github Skills (16)
apache-arrow10
cuda10
parquet10
memory-management10
cudf10
c-language10
go10
cpp10
cprogramming-language10
gpu10
arrow-keys10
arrows10
arrow-js10
data-engineering9
data-structure9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
apache/arrow
May 2018 - Jan 2023
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Data Engineer
Back-end Developer & Data EngineerContributions:1783 reviews, 104 commits, 628 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matt made significant contributions to the Apache Arrow project, specifically focusing on improving the handling of array data and the integration of Parquet. The commits show work related to fixing memory leaks during IPC data handling, proper dictionary array encoding and decoding, and enhancing the framework by introducing the "unique" function. Their work also involved enabling and refining support for various data types, including list types and decimal types within the Parquet implementation, and they also made improvements to data handling, and added functions for improved data handling.
memorymulti-languagetoolboxacceleratedarrow
rapidsai/cudf
Jan 2024 - Mar 2025
cuDF - GPU DataFrame Library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:110 reviews, 6 PRs, 186 comments in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Matt primarily contributes to the `cudf` library, focusing on interop functionalities. Their work includes adding `to_arrow_device` and `from_arrow_device` functions, enabling zero-copy data transfer between cuDF and Apache Arrow using nanoarrow. They implemented host memory versions, `to_arrow_host`, streamlining memory copies. The changes demonstrate an understanding of data structures and memory management within the context of GPU data processing.
cudadataframe-librarydata-analysiscppcudf
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