Pavel Velikhov
Head Of Optimizer Team at YDB
Moscow, Moscow City, Russia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPavel Velikhov is a seasoned R&D leader and database engineer with over a decade of experience building and optimizing large-scale analytical and transactional systems. Currently Head of the Optimizer Team at YDB, he combines hands-on backend development—notably improving query planning, join processing and statistics for the open-source YDB distributed SQL database—with strategic team leadership. His background spans MPP analytics (GaussDB A, SciDB), data science and production ML, and founding a startup focused on reliable enterprise AI. Pavel has a track record of moving research into production: from prize-winning ML work at UC San Diego to leading engineering teams at TigerGraph and Huawei. He teaches practical ML deployment topics and is comfortable across database internals, NLP, and large-scale data integration. An often-overlooked strength is his balance of deep algorithmic insight with product-minded engineering, enabling measurable performance gains in complex systems.
10 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San Diego
English, Russian
Stackoverflow
315reputation
42kreached
6answers
8questions
Github Skills (24)
c-language10
admin10
databases10
query-optimization10
database-administration10
ydb10
cprogramming-language10
distributed-database10
relational-databases10
sql-database10
database10
dbm9
sql9
dbms9
cpp9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
ydb-platform/ydb
Jul 2023 - Apr 2025
YDB is an open source Distributed SQL Database that combines high availability and scalability with strong consistency and ACID transactions
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:167 reviews, 204 PRs, 97 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Pavel primarily focused on enhancing the YDB database's query optimization capabilities. Their work included implementing and refactoring features to improve query planning, specifically in the context of join operations within the system. They also contributed to improvements in statistics collection and use, which is critical for effective query optimization. Additionally, the user made changes related to index lookups, demonstrating involvement with database internals and performance.
dbmsdistributed-sql-databaseydbdatabaseconsistency
pavelvelikhov/ydb
Dec 2023 - Apr 2025
YDB is an open source Distributed SQL Database that combines high availability and scalability with strong consistency and ACID transactions
Contributions:1 PR, 397 pushes, 100 branches in 1 year 3 months
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