Sebastian Utz
Senior Principal Engineer at CrateDB
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Utz is a Senior Principal Engineer based in Berlin with 14 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, currently leading technical work at CrateDB. He has progressed through roles from Core Developer to Director of Engineering and now senior principal, combining deep hands-on database engineering with team leadership and product-focused delivery. His contributions to CrateDB include performance and consistency improvements in the SQL engine and query execution—work that matters for real-time analytics on large datasets. Comfortable across backend and database internals, he specializes in ensuring correctness and stability for complex join and type-handling scenarios. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architecture decisions that balance performance with maintainability. Outside the obvious leadership arc, he brings long-term continuity to projects, having shaped CrateDB’s core over more than a decade.
13 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Old School
Github Skills (11)
databases10
query-optimization10
sql10
database10
convertion9
conversions9
data-conversion9
type-conversion9
hash8
hashtable8
indexing8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
crate/crate
Sep 2013 - Jan 2023
CrateDB is a distributed and scalable SQL database for storing and analyzing massive amounts of data in near real-time, even with complex queries. It is PostgreSQL-compatible, and based on Lucene.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:22 releases, 2414 reviews, 1937 commits in 9 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian focused on improving the performance and consistency of the query execution within the CrateDB project. They implemented and improved core database functionalities like ensuring correct ordering of hash symbols for join operations, and correct column types from string and numeric values. Their contributions targeted performance and stability improvements of SQL engine and data management operations.
dbmscratedbon-toptime-seriesindustrial-iot
crate/elasticsearch
Jan 2015 - Jan 2019
Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Contributions:68 PRs, 127 pushes, 93 branches in 4 years
restfulsearch-engineopensearchdatabaseelasticsearch
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