Rachael Harding
Engineering Manager at Cockroach Labs
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRachael Harding is an engineering manager in Palo Alto with 11 years of experience building and leading teams that design and optimize distributed systems for scalability and performance. She progressed from software engineering roles at Google to deep product and backend contributions at Cockroach Labs, where she moved from Member of Technical Staff to Engineering Manager. Her hands-on work on CockroachDB includes enhancing SQL capabilities, improving test suites, and fixing subtle mixed-version cluster bugs—demonstrating a strong bias for reliability and testability in distributed databases. She combines rigorous academic training (Ph.D. and S.M. in Computer Science from MIT, B.S. from Carnegie Mellon) with practical production experience shipping cloud-native systems. Known for fostering individual growth and team cohesion, she balances technical leadership with operational attention to customer needs. An understated strength is her ability to translate complex research-grade systems work into robust, testable product features that scale in real-world deployments.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science (B.S.) Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
English
Github Skills (11)
databases10
go10
relational-databases10
sql10
sql-database10
database10
testing10
distributed-systems9
data-structures4
algorithms4
data-structure4
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Jul 2021 - 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
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1286 reviews, 55 commits, 356 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Rachael primarily contributed to improving the CockroachDB database, focusing on enhancing its SQL features. Their work included addressing a bug related to the `AvgSize` table stats in mixed-version clusters by adding version gatekeeping. They also implemented functionality related to running the pg_regress test suite against CockroachDB and the UDF features. Additionally, the user improved the usability of tests and the product by adding more testing capabilities and refining the behavior of the test suites.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
rharding6373/cockroach
Jul 2021 - Mar 2025
CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.
Contributions:655 pushes, 288 branches in 3 years 8 months
distributed-sqloltpdistributed-sql-databasemysqltidb
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