Zach Schuermann
Engineer at Variational
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZach Schuermann is a systems-focused software engineer with 10 years of experience building scalable, high-performance infrastructure and storage systems from the Bay Area. He helped co-found Databricks' delta-kernel—a Rust, query-engine-agnostic reimplementation of the Delta table format—and has contributed substantive backend enhancements to the widely used open-source Delta Lake project. Zach bridges cloud data platforms, low-level systems, and embedded work, with past roles spanning predictive optimization, Unity Catalog, Apache Spark, algorithmic trading infrastructure, and embedded systems research. Now at Variational, he continues to scale Rust-based systems, combining production engineering rigor with an academic background (Columbia MS, dual bachelors) and a knack for shipping robust, cross-domain technical solutions.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Columbia UniversityBachelor's degree Computer Engineering, Bachelor's degree Computer Engineering at University of Oklahoma – Gallogly College of Engineering
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (10)
big-data10
spark10
delta-lake10
scala10
acid9
sql9
data-storage9
indentation6
emacs6
haskell6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
delta-io/delta
Jun 2020 - Sep 2022
An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 11 commits, 17 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily contributed to enhancing the Delta Lake storage framework, focusing on features such as adding user-defined metadata and supporting querying the last commit version in the SparkSession. They also worked on extending MERGE functionality to allow unlimited MATCHED/NOT MATCHED clauses, addressing a bug in the table creation process related to user metadata. Their commits involved modifying core components of the Delta Lake implementation, like the `CommitInfo` and `DeltaOperations` classes and also modifying test suites.
analyticsprestodbflinkbig-dataspark
delta-io/delta-kernel-rs
Mar 2024 - Apr 2025
A native Delta implementation for integration with any query engine
Contributions:928 reviews, 170 PRs, 73 pushes in 1 year
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