Rafi Shamim
Member Of The Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inGo Development and Data Management
Rafi Shamim is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff with 13 years of experience building high-performance, distributed systems and real-time recommendation infrastructure. A Princeton CS graduate, he has worked on scaling low-latency machine-learning services at Knewton and now contributes to core SQL execution and consistency features at Cockroach Labs. He combines deep backend engineering—Java/Python, concurrency, microservices, and database internals—with a track record of cost-saving architecture changes and deployment automation. An active open-source contributor, his work on Liquibase and CockroachDB focused on database compatibility, schema handling, and robust test automation that improved stability for widely used tooling and a major cloud-native DB. Based in New York, he pairs rigorous CS foundations with pragmatic production experience, and his Github motto, “Most things are possible,” reflects a bias toward solving messy, real-world problems.
13 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Rutgers Preparatory SchoolBachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), Computer Science, 3.78 overall; 3.96 departmental, Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), Computer Science, 3.78 overall; 3.96 departmental at Princeton University
Github Skills (27)
database-migrations10
postgresql10
cockroachdb10
testing10
databases10
query-optimization10
distributed-systems10
database-administration10
liquibase10
java10
javas10
go10
performance-optimization10
optimisation10
sql10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
May 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
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5406 reviews, 1623 commits, 3428 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Rafi primarily contributes to the back-end development of CockroachDB, focusing on database-related logic and improvements. Their work includes bug fixes and optimizations for core features like SQL functions, index handling, and schema changes. They also contributed to the testing infrastructure, demonstrated by their work on the automated test suites in this project. Their work has directly impacted the stability and performance of the database, particularly with relation to the read-committed isolation level.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
liquibase/liquibase
Aug 2020 - Oct 2020
Main Liquibase Source
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:1 review, 10 commits, 2 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Rafi primarily focused on enhancing the Liquibase project's database support, specifically for CockroachDB. Their contributions involved adding functionality to handle DESC primary keys in CockroachDB, which required modifications to the database snapshot process and the addition of integration tests. They also addressed the handling of unique constraints and adjusted the project's code to accommodate differences between CockroachDB and other supported databases, such as Postgres. Their work demonstrates a focus on database compatibility and test-driven development.
sqlserverdatabase-migrationscontinuous-integrationcontinuous-deploymentdatabase
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