William Schultz
Staff Research Engineer at MongoDB
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Schultz is a Staff Research Engineer at MongoDB with 11 years of experience building and verifying distributed systems, combining deep backend and database expertise with formal methods research. He has a track record of improving MongoDB replication internals—optimizing startup performance, stabilizing timestamps, and adding test and logging facilities—and has contributed to the core mongodb/mongo project. William holds a PhD in Computer Science from Northeastern and has applied formal verification and model-checking techniques across internships at Microsoft, Apple, and AWS, bridging theory and production systems. Notably, he enhanced visualization and debugging of TLA+ model checker outputs, reflecting a rare mix of practical database engineering and formal specification tooling. Based in Cambridge, MA, he excels at turning rigorous proofs and models into tangible reliability improvements for large-scale distributed databases.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (BA) Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA) Mathematics and Computer Science at Cornell UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Northeastern University
Github Skills (19)
spec10
nosql10
databases10
database-administration10
model-checking10
java10
javas10
replica-set10
specification10
database10
testing9
c-language9
algorithms9
mongodb-database9
cprogramming-language9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
mongodb/mongo
Oct 2016 - Jul 2020
The MongoDB Database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:462 commits, 1 PR, 283 pushes in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the MongoDB database project by addressing issues related to replica set configurations, testing of configurations, and improving the efficiency of the system. Their work included fixing an issue related to the stable timestamp, adding test commands for measuring performance, and addressing a problem in reconfig test. The user also added logging and made performance optimizations to speed up the startup process of replica sets, demonstrating an understanding of database internals and performance tuning.
nosqlc-plus-plusmongodb-databasedatabasemongodb
tlaplus/tlaplus
Jan 2018 - May 2020
TLC is a model checker for specifications written in TLA+. The TLA+Toolbox is an IDE for TLA+.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 10 PRs, 104 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the `tlatools/tlaplus` repository by implementing features related to visualizing and debugging state graphs generated by TLC. They focused on enhancing the `DotStateWriter.java` class to colorize edges based on actions and add action labels to improve the clarity of state transition diagrams. Furthermore, the user refined comments and code formatting.
model-checkingmodel-checkermit-licensemodel-statechecker
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