Will Jones
Senior Software Engineer at LanceDB (YC W22)
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWill Jones is a Senior Software Engineer in Portland with 11 years of experience building analytical systems and backend infrastructure for data-intensive applications. He currently helps develop LanceDB, a serverless vector database for AI, and serves on the Apache Arrow PMC, contributing production-quality Rust and Python bindings for high-performance columnar and Parquet tooling. His work spans backend systems, FFI/FFI testing, CI/CD, and object-store integrations—evidenced by patches that improved Parquet boolean handling, memory management, and PyArrow interoperability in widely used Apache projects. Prior roles combined enterprise open-source support and building secure, monitored data pipelines at M Science, where he consolidated data-labeling platforms and ran Spark/Airflow ETL into Snowflake. Pragmatic and detail-oriented, he pairs a mathematics/statistics background with deep systems-level contributions that keep critical data tooling reliable at scale.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics with a Concentration in Statistics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Mathematics with a Concentration in Statistics at Reed College
English
Github Skills (34)
develop10
c-language10
delta-lake10
pyarrow10
python10
data-engineering10
testing10
vector-database10
arrow-keys10
list-processing10
apache-arrow10
array-map10
sql10
parquet10
query-engine10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
lancedb/lancedb
May 2023 - Apr 2025
Developer-friendly, embedded retrieval engine for multimodal AI. Search More; Manage Less.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:25 releases, 679 reviews, 449 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Will's commits primarily focus on the backend development of the LanceDB project, specifically related to the Node.js module and Rust codebase. They are involved in implementing features related to vector database functionality, loading native libraries, and building the CI/CD pipeline. They refactored the Node module to load shared libraries from a separate package, and aligned Rust and Node versions. They also added support for features like deleting records from the table and the ability to execute multiple vectors as a query.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchimage-searchnearest-neighbor-searchrecommender-systemsearch-engine
delta-io/delta-rs
Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
A native Rust library for Delta Lake, with bindings into Python
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 670 reviews, 38 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the Python bindings for the delta-rs project, focusing on enhancing the interaction between the Rust library and Python. Their work includes creating PyArrow dataset fragments, refreshing Python usage documentation, and implementing a PyArrow writer. The user also worked on parsing partition values, enforcing schema validation, handling null statistics, and fixing path issues.
lakedatabricksdeltapythonrust-library
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.