Oliver Tan
Software Engineer at Cursor
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inGo Development and Data Management
Oliver Tan is a software engineer in Sydney with 11 years of experience building scalable, production-grade systems across databases, backend services, and data pipelines. He has led technical work at Cockroach Labs—implementing geospatial features, multi-region replication, and patented replica placement logic—and later helped found Adora, where he built end-to-end ingestion, analytics, and AI integration infrastructure. Comfortable across Go, Node.js and cloud tooling, he’s shipped high-throughput services at Dropbox and implemented Open Banking integrations at Plaid. An active open-source contributor, Oliver has improved core database drivers and spatial libraries (notably CockroachDB and go-geom), fixing tricky geometry edge cases and adding pg_lsn support. He combines deep systems and database expertise with a product-minded approach to shipping reliable migrations, CI, and observability. Colleagues know him for mentoring, tooling improvements, and a practical streak that turns complex data problems into robust, maintainable solutions.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
UNSW Sydney
English, Chinese
Github Skills (18)
postgresql10
cockroachdb10
testing10
databases10
database-driver10
go10
sql10
3d10
golang10
rust10
2d10
database10
decode9
decoding9
encoding9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
lib/pq
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Pure Go Postgres driver for database/sql
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 13 reviews, 18 commits in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Oliver primarily focused on enhancing the `lib/pq` Go Postgres driver, addressing time-related data type handling. They fixed issues with time encoding, specifically for the "24:00" time representation and time zone offsets. The user also implemented improvements to the CI workflow and exposed the `CopyData` command for raw data insertion into the COPY stream. This involved modifications to both the core driver logic and test suites to ensure correct behavior.
golangsql-databasesqlpure-godatabase
cockroachdb/cockroach
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
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:2342 reviews, 1710 commits, 1663 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Oliver primarily contributed to the database layer of the project, specifically focusing on the implementation and refinement of geographic functions within the CockroachDB database. Their work involved fixing bugs related to the handling of geometry operations, such as ensuring the correct handling of NaN coordinates and enforcing valid geometries. Moreover, the user improved the core database functionality by implementing and integrating the `pg_lsn` data type and implementing several operations relating to it. The user's contributions were centered on enhancing the database's stability, functionality and the accuracy of its query results.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
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