Michael Butler
Software Engineer at Cockroach Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Butler is a software engineer with 8 years of experience building reliable backend systems, currently focused on large-scale bulk operations like backup, restore, import, and export at Cockroach Labs. He brings a strong academic foundation in computational science (MS, Harvard) and economics (BA, Bowdoin) to practical systems work, blending quantitative rigor with software engineering. As an open-source contributor to cockroachdb/pebble, he has driven improvements to compaction mechanics that reduce write amplification and improve throughput—work that touches core storage engine performance. Prior roles at Microsoft and policy research show an unusual mix of empirical analysis and production engineering, making him adept at turning data-driven insights into scalable system improvements.
8 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors of Arts, Economics, Bachelors of Arts, Economics at Bowdoin CollegeMaster of Science - MS, Computational Science and Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Computational Science and Engineering at Harvard UniversityThe Mountain School of Milton Academy
Github Skills (8)
algorithm10
algorithms10
key-value-database10
go10
data-structure9
data-structures9
benchmark7
benchmarking7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/pebble
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
RocksDB/LevelDB inspired key-value database in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:66 reviews, 6 commits, 30 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael focused on implementing and improving the compaction process within the Pebble key-value database. Their contributions include introducing multi-level compaction mechanics, adding a max-size flag for benchmarks, introducing a multi-level compaction heuristic, and improving synthetic suffix replacement. These changes aimed to enhance the efficiency and performance of the database's compaction algorithms, leading to potential improvements in write amplification and overall throughput.
gokey-value-databaseleveldbrocksdb
msbutler/pebble
Feb 2022 - Mar 2024
RocksDB/LevelDB inspired key-value database in Go
Contributions:191 pushes, 30 branches in 2 years
golangrocksdbnosql-databaseleveldblsm-tree
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