Rebecca Taft
Director, Engineering at Cockroach Labs
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRebecca Taft is a Director of Engineering with 11 years of experience designing and shipping distributed systems, currently leading engineering at Cockroach Labs from Chicago. She progressed through individual contributor and management roles at Cockroach Labs, contributing hands-on to CockroachDB—adding cost estimation telemetry, optimizer fixes, index improvements, and join-operation telemetry—bringing deep database internals expertise to leadership. Rebecca holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and a BS in Physics from Yale, combining rigorous research training with practical production engineering. Known for bridging research-grade problem solving with operational reliability, she focuses on making complex distributed SQL features observable and robust. Colleagues rely on her to translate low-level performance fixes into product-level improvements that scale across cloud-native deployments.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBS Physics, BS Physics at Yale University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (11)
databases10
go10
sql10
database-design10
database-optimization10
database10
distributed-database9
telemetry9
algorithms8
algorithm8
postgresql8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Oct 2017 - Jan 2023
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:2377 reviews, 1085 commits, 1134 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Rebecca's contributions focused on enhancing the CockroachDB database system. Their work included adding functionality for cost estimation and distribution to telemetry logging, improving the optimizer to prevent errors related to inverted index scans and partition by list clauses, and making cluster settings public. The user also implemented bug fixes related to TIMETZ column indexing, the performance of the DISTINCT ON functionality, and also worked on improving index recommendations. Finally, the user contributed to telemetry by adding data collection for various join operations.
cloud-nativecockroachdbhigh-availabilitysql-databasego
rytaft/cockroach
Oct 2017 - May 2026
CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native SQL database.
Contributions:2572 pushes, 1070 branches, 4 tags in 8 years 8 months
cloud-nativecockroachdbsql-database
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