Sam Willis
Founding Engineer at ElectricSQL
South Kesteven, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Willis is a founder and engineering leader with 14 years of experience building distributed systems, developer tooling, and local-first collaborative applications. As Co-founder and Chief Data Officer at Electric, he drives product and technical strategy for Postgres sync, durable streams, and AI agent infrastructure while also contributing low-level database work (notably on the embeddable pglite Postgres/WASM project). He combines hands-on backend and database engineering with product design fluency from scaling a print-on-demand e-commerce business to seven-figure revenue and 250k+ orders. Comfortable across TypeScript, Postgres, SQLite, CRDTs and realtime systems, he focuses on resilient, realtime sync and developer experience for multi-agent systems. Sam’s multidisciplinary background in design, hardware-integrated product engineering, and bioinformatics consultancy gives him a rare blend of systems thinking and user-centered product judgment.
14 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BA (Hons), Industrial Design and Technology, BA (Hons), Industrial Design and Technology at Loughborough University
Github Skills (16)
postgresql10
database-design10
wasm-pack9
fileio9
rust-wasm9
file-operations9
filesystem9
transaction9
transaction-manager9
transactionscope9
psql8
pgsql8
plpgsql8
c178
pg8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
electric-sql/pglite
Feb 2024 - Mar 2025
Embeddable Postgres with real-time, reactive bindings.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:15 releases, 127 reviews, 322 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the back-end functionality and database integration within the `pglite` repository. They focused on implementing core database features, as shown by the bug fixes and added support for features like PL/PGSQL and full-text search. The user demonstrated experience working with the Postgres wire protocol and implemented features related to transaction management and file/blob handling, alongside optimizations.
databasepostgreswasm
samwillis/nodejs-pypi
Jun 2022 - Nov 2022
Project to repackage Node.js releases as Python binary wheels for distribution via PyPI
Contributions:17 commits, 3 PRs, 10 pushes in 4 months
pythonvirtual-environmentpypipipnode-js
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