Slava Akhmechet
Engineering at Microsoft
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSlava Akhmechet is a seasoned engineering leader with 19 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems and developer-facing products, currently at Microsoft after leading Cassandra and distributed Postgres services in Azure. He co-founded RethinkDB (YC S09), grew it to thousands of users and a successful acquisition by Stripe, and later helped relaunch Stripe Billing as a core product. Comfortable across the full stack, his open-source contributions to RethinkDB and Horizon span JSON parsing, real-time backends, WebSocket clients, and documentation improvements—demonstrating both deep systems chops and attention to developer experience. An active startup advisor in crypto and a former PhD candidate in computational neuroscience, he blends research instincts with pragmatic product execution. Based in the NYC metro area, Slava pairs entrepreneurial grit with hands-on engineering and a talent for turning complex distributed problems into reliable, user-facing services.
20 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Y CombinatorPhD Computational Neuroscience (dropped out to start RethinkDB), PhD Computational Neuroscience (dropped out to start RethinkDB) at Stony Brook University
Stackoverflow
1,348reputation
24kreached
14answers
1question
mongodb
top-5%
nosql
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
json10
javascript10
python10
rethinkdb-go10
websocket10
rethinkdb10
websockets-client10
front-end-development10
websocket-client10
client-websocket10
documentation10
nosql9
markdown9
databases9
yaml9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
rethinkdb/docs
Nov 2013 - Oct 2015
RethinkDB documentation
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:76 commits, 1 PR, 14 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Slava's commits primarily involve modifying the documentation for the RethinkDB project. They focused on updating existing documentation by addressing the code samples in `_scripts/gen_python.py` to provide better examples. Additionally, they merged multiple branches related to tutorial updates, demonstrating involvement in improving the completeness of the documentation, and refining the user's experience with the product.
rethinkdb
rethinkdb/rethinkdb
Oct 2009 - Oct 2015
The open-source database for the realtime web.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Slava primarily contributed to the RethinkDB project by modifying internal components, particularly related to the JSON parsing and handling within the database. They focused on updating the JSON conversion process, adjusting code to align with changes in the data structure and YAML format. Furthermore, the user made changes to the AMI setup text and associated pages.
database
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