Weston Pace
Software Engineer at LanceDB (YC W22)
Olympia, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWeston Pace is a software engineer with 11 years of professional experience and over seven years focused on full‑stack development in telecom and data systems. He currently helps build LanceDB, an open-source vector/multimodal database, and has made substantial backend and database contributions to high-profile projects like Apache Arrow, DataFusion, and Substrait. Weston excels at performance-sensitive storage and parallel I/O work—optimizing dataset writers, fixing concurrency bugs, and improving CI reliability—while also bridging engineering and community needs from individual contributors to standards efforts. He has led engineering teams, mentored developers, and consistently turned messy legacy systems into maintainable, high-performance products. Equally comfortable in Rust, C++, and higher-level stacks, he pairs deep systems knowledge with pragmatic product thinking to reduce technical debt and accelerate delivery. Based in Olympia, WA, he brings a rare combination of protocol/format-level contributions and hands-on database engineering that helps teams adopt modern tooling effectively.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor, Computer Science, Mathematics, Bachelor, Computer Science, Mathematics at Colorado State University
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Github Skills (74)
python10
testing10
vector-database10
datasets10
apache-arrow10
maven10
async10
protocol-buffers10
database-design10
rust10
relational-algebra10
angular10
c-language10
data-set10
typescript10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
substrait-io/substrait
Sep 2021 - Jan 2023
A cross platform way to express data transformation, relational algebra, standardized record expression and plans.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:508 reviews, 21 commits, 113 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Weston primarily contributed to the core functionality and structure of the Substrait project, focusing on data transformation and query planning. Their work included refactoring code to use deterministic terminology and updating C# namespaces in protobuf definitions. Further, they modified and extended the project's data format definitions by adding support for new file formats (Arrow, Orc) and adding new features to the data ingestion pipelines.
transformationplansrelationalexpressalgebra
lancedb/lancedb
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
Developer-friendly, embedded retrieval engine for multimodal AI. Search More; Manage Less.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:10 releases, 331 reviews, 170 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Weston's contributions centered on enhancing the LanceDB Python client by adding functionality for scalar indices and merge insert operations. The user implemented support for prefiltering with an index in tests and added the ability to create scalar indices, directly binding to underlying Lance capabilities. They also upgraded to Lance 0.9.11 and exposed the merge_insert functionality, adding merge insert functionality to the node and rust APIs. Furthermore, the user added filterable row counting and implemented the `update` functionality to the async API.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchimage-searchnearest-neighbor-searchrecommender-systemsearch-engine
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