Peter Mattis
Co-founder And CTO At Cockroach Labs
Greenwich, Connecticut, United States
Summary
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Top expert inGo Development and Data Management
Peter Mattis is a seasoned founder and engineering leader with over a decade building distributed systems, currently serving as Co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs. He brings deep, hands-on expertise in database internals and performance engineering, with notable open-source contributions to CockroachDB, the Pebble key-value engine, and the etcd Raft implementation. His work often targets low-level optimizations—manual inlining, cache structure tuning, and dynamic memtable growth—that yield measurable throughput and latency improvements. Prior roles include senior engineering positions at Square, Viewfinder, and nearly a decade at Google, giving him broad experience from product startups to large-scale infrastructure. Based in Greenwich, CT and trained in EECS at UC Berkeley, he blends rigorous systems thinking with practical shipping discipline. A less obvious strength is his focus on subtle protocol and concurrency fixes (e.g., quiesced Raft groups and resumed follower handling) that improve reliability in real-world clustered deployments.
12 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, BS Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
627reputation
9kreached
14answers
7questions
Github Skills (25)
key-value10
testing10
databases10
distributed-systems10
go10
performance-optimization10
sql10
raft10
distributed-database10
concurrency10
database10
consensus9
caching9
kubernetes9
etcd9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/pebble
Jun 2018 - Nov 2021
RocksDB/LevelDB inspired key-value database in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:273 reviews, 1539 commits, 810 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Peter made several contributions related to optimizing the performance of the Pebble database's low-level routines. They manually inlined several functions, including blockIter.decodeInternalKey, decodeVarint, and db.DecodeInternalKey, for performance gains. They also addressed performance bottlenecks in the codebase by adjusting the data structures used for caching. In addition, the user worked on optimizing the compaction and flush processes, by adding features such as support for greater-than-1GB sstable blocks and introducing a mechanism for dynamically growing the memtable size.
golangrocksdbtransactionalnosql-databasedatastore
cockroachdb/cockroach
Feb 2014 - Feb 2022
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 release, 292 reviews, 3767 commits in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Peter primarily contributed to the backend aspects of the CockroachDB project. Their work included fixing test failures related to Bazel builds within the `publish-artifacts` package by renaming test functions to avoid conflicts. They also removed obsolete code, like the `ConvertToSchema` event, and made adjustments to event logging by directing cluster settings events to the OPS channel. Furthermore, they removed unused fields and deprecated features related to session event logging, and removing the gossip eventlog.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
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