Lawrence Benson
Software Engineer at Snowflake
Berlin, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLawrence Benson is a software engineer based in Berlin with 11 years of experience focused on database internals and high-performance systems. He holds a PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute and has bridged academic research and production engineering through roles from PostDoc at TUM to software engineering positions at Snowflake and Google. His open-source contributions to the well-known Hyrise in-memory database include adding robust CSV import/export and NULL handling, demonstrating deep knowledge of storage, parsing, and testing. Lawrence has repeatedly worked on distributed and streaming systems, disaster recovery, and query optimisation across C++, Python, Scala and Java ecosystems. He combines rigorous research experience with practical impact—shipping features used in both research prototypes and commercial platforms. Colleagues describe him as a developer who turns low-level database challenges into reliable, well-tested solutions.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute
English, German
Stackoverflow
1,396reputation
61kreached
33answers
8questions
Github Skills (15)
in-memory-database10
databases10
c-language10
csv-import10
cprogramming-language10
memory-database10
sql10
database10
testing10
psycopg6
webscraping6
python6
fileio6
regex6
sorting6
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
hyrise/hyrise
Oct 2017 - Jul 2018
Hyrise is a research in-memory database.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:39 commits, 43 PRs, 170 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Lawrence focused on enhancing CSV import/export functionalities within the research in-memory database, Hyrise. Their contributions involved adding support for NULL values in both import and export processes. They made changes to the database's source code to handle CSV related global strings, NULL representations, and implemented tests to validate the new features. This included modifications to the CsvParser, CsvConverter, and related test files, showcasing expertise in database internals and data handling.
in-memory-databasedatabasecppsqlcolumn-store
lawben/drivesyncpy
Dec 2015 - May 2016
Contributions:28 commits, 8 pushes, 1 comment in 5 months
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