Michael Litvak
Software Engineer at ScyllaDB
Israel
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Litvak is a software engineer with 12 years of experience specializing in high-performance backend systems and storage software. Currently at ScyllaDB after five years on Dell Technologies' storage data path team, he brings deep expertise in concurrency, exception-safe low-level programming, and distributed database internals. His open-source contributions to Seastar and ScyllaDB show hands-on work fixing race conditions, improving scheduler safety, and enabling raft-based operations—skills that translate to production-critical, low-latency systems. He also contributes front-end fixes to projects like linux-dash, demonstrating an eye for usability alongside systems engineering. Based in Israel and educated at Technion, he combines rigorous academic grounding with practical experience shipping robust backend features at scale. An attention to subtle concurrency issues and memory-safety improvements marks him as a dependable engineer for demanding distributed systems.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Hebrew, English
Github Skills (34)
asynchronous10
javascript10
dashboard10
c-language10
nosql10
cassandra10
async10
databases10
scylla10
webpages10
ui-design10
web-content10
seastar10
aio10
cpp10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
scylladb/scylladb
Jun 2024 - Apr 2025
NoSQL data store using the seastar framework, compatible with Apache Cassandra
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:192 reviews, 41 PRs, 373 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the database backend of ScyllaDB. The commits involve refactoring and renaming core database components, particularly related to hints and sync points, and migrating these to use Host IDs for consistency. They also introduced and refactored the handling of view updates, including optimizations to improve efficiency with partition tombstones. Moreover, the user worked on enabling raft-based operations, and testing of counter updates with table dropping.
cppnosqlseastarcassandrasql
scylladb/seastar
Jun 2024 - Jan 2025
High performance server-side application framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 2 PRs, 16 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael focused on improving the core functionality of the Seastar framework, specifically addressing race conditions and improving exception safety within the scheduling group and key creation processes. Their work involved the introduction of shared mutexes to prevent concurrent issues, the use of a map instead of a vector for key configurations to manage concurrent key creation safely, and the implementation of exception-safe memory management. The user also optimized the code by refactoring and fixing indentation issues. This demonstrates a deep understanding of concurrency and low-level system programming.
seastarc-plus-plusdpdkframeworkperformance
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