Contact Us
Contact Us

Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

database consultants - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

In today’s rapidly evolving data landscape, a select group of database experts stand out for their active contributions to technology.

These individuals excel in one or more areas: open-source database development, founding tech companies while still coding, influential tech blogging and speaking, leadership in major tech firms’ database teams, or top rankings in international programming competitions. Below is a list of 17 of the best current database consultants (broadly, hands-on experts and leaders) across SQL, NoSQL, graph, and beyond. Each profile includes a photo, a brief bio highlighting why they’re among the top, and links to their social/professional pages.

  1. Spencer Kimball
  2. Sugu Sougoumarane
  3. Michael “Monty” Widenius
  4. D. Richard Hipp
  5. Paul Dix
  6. Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)
  7. Marko A. Rodriguez
  8. Marcin Żukowski
  9. Bruce Momjian
  10. Dhruba Borthakur
  11. Eliot Horowitz
  12. Emil Eifrem
  13. Sanjay Ghemawat
  14. Matei Zaharia
  15. Avi Kivity
  16. Yoshinori Matsunobu
  17. Neha Narkhede

Now, let’s delve deeper into each of these developers’ accomplishments and contributions:

Spencer Kimball

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Spencer Kimball – Spencer is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, where he helped create CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database inspired by Google Spanner.

An open-source veteran, Spencer’s programming career began by co-authoring the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a college student. After years as a Google software engineer, he applied his experience in distributed systems to build CockroachDB’s resilient architecture. Spencer has been directly involved in CockroachDB’s source code development, especially in its early design and Go implementation, ensuring it meets the promise of global consistency and indestructibility (hence the name “Cockroach”). His continuous technical leadership and coding contributions in creating a next-generation database make him a standout in the field.

Sugu Sougoumarane

Nationality: Indian

Sugu Sougoumarane – Sugu is the co-creator of Vitess, the scalability solution that underpins YouTube’s massive MySQL deployment, and co-founder/CTO of PlanetScale.

While at Google, Sugu helped design Vitess as an orchestration layer to shard and manage MySQL across thousands of nodes, effectively turning MySQL into a sharded, fault-tolerant distributed database. Today, Vitess is a graduated CNCF open-source project powering systems at Slack, Etsy, and others. Sugu continues to actively code and lead the development of Vitess at PlanetScale (now offered as a managed cloud DB). He focuses on evolving Vitess’s query routing, consistency, and performance. By bridging the reliability of MySQL with web-scale architectures, and remaining an approachable engineering leader (he often blogs and speaks about Vitess internals), Sugu has earned recognition as a top database engineer.

Michael “Monty” Widenius

Michael Monty Widenius - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

Nationality: Finnish

Michael “Monty” Widenius – Monty is the main author of MySQL and a co-founder of MySQL AB. He coded the first release of MySQL entirely by himself, helping make it the world’s most popular open-source relational database.

After MySQL’s acquisition, he founded MariaDB to keep the project open-source, and remains actively involved as a software architect. As CTO of the MariaDB Corporation and founder of the MariaDB Foundation, Monty continues to guide database innovation while actively coding and mentoring developers. His enduring impact on open-source databases and ongoing technical leadership secure his place among the top experts.

D. Richard Hipp

Nationality: American

D. Richard Hipp – The creator of SQLite, Richard (often known as “Drh”) is the primary author of this ultra-ubiquitous embedded database engine. SQLite is found literally everywhere – from browsers to mobile phones – with billions of deployments. Richard is also the author of the Fossil DVCS and the Lemon parser generator. He remains deeply involved in coding SQLite’s development, carefully maintaining its reliability and extension features. His dedication to simplicity and stability in database software, along with continuous hands-on development, makes him one of the most respected figures in the database world.

Paul Dix

Nationality: American

Paul Dix – Paul is the creator of InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and co-founder/CTO of InfluxData. He started InfluxDB in 2013 to address the need for a high-performance database for metrics and events, writing its initial version in Ruby and then Go.

Under Paul’s leadership, InfluxDB evolved into an entire “TICK” stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor) for time-series data, and gained a large open-source community. Paul remains very hands-on, guiding the design of InfluxDB’s new IOx engine (built in Rust using Apache Arrow) and even coding parts of it. An active blogger and speaker, he shares insights on time-series indexing, compression, and query languages (he designed InfluxQL and now IOx’s Flux language). Paul’s ongoing innovation in time-series databases and commitment to open source make him a top consultant in the database arena.

Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)

Salvatore Sanfilippo - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

Nationality: Italian

Salvatore Sanfilippo – Known by his online handle “antirez,” Salvatore is the original creator of Redis, the in-memory NoSQL datastore. He developed Redis in 2009 to solve real-time logging for his startup, and it has since become a staple of modern architectures.

Salvatore led Redis’s open-source development for a decade, famously keeping its C codebase clean and approachable. In 2020, he stepped down as maintainer, but later returned to coding on the project and related tools. He continues to hack on open-source (recently exploring new data structures and AI). As an influential programmer who still loves to write code, Salvatore’s work on high-performance data systems and his active community presence (blogging and speaking) cement his status as a top database expert.

Marko A. Rodriguez

Nationality: American

Marko A. Rodriguez – Marko is a prominent figure in graph databases and analytics. He co-founded the Apache TinkerPop project, creating the Gremlin graph query language and computing framework that became the standard for property graph databases.

Marko’s work enabled a vendor-agnostic way to traverse graphs, influencing systems like JanusGraph, Cosmos DB, and Neo4j (which adopted Gremlin as an alternative API). He also co-founded the graph startup Aurelius, where he led development of the Titan graph database (later acquired by DataStax). After that, Marko joined Amazon Web Services as a principal engineer to work on the Amazon Neptune graph database, applying his expertise to a managed cloud service. He’s an active contributor to open-source (continuing to improve TinkerPop) and often shares his research on graph algorithms. Marko’s unique specialization in graph query processing and active coding role in multiple graph database initiatives make him stand out among database experts.

Marcin Żukowski

Nationality: Polish

Marcin Żukowski – Marcin is a co-founder of Snowflake Inc., where he helped build the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse, and a pioneer in query processing technology.

He earned his Ph.D. researching vectorized query execution (which led to the MonetDB/X100 project) and co-founded VectorWise, a high-performance analytic database acquired by Actian. In 2012 Marcin joined Snowflake as one of its first engineers, applying his columnar execution expertise to architect Snowflake’s unique cloud-native SQL engine. He is credited with designing Snowflake’s optimizer and efficient storage format that handles semi-structured data. Though Snowflake is now a large company, Marcin has remained closely involved in its R&D; he is known to jump into code reviews and mentor engineering teams on database internals. His blend of academic prowess (including a SIGMOD award) and real-world system-building places Marcin among the top-tier database specialists.

Bruce Momjian

Bruce Momjian - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

Nationality: American

Bruce Momjian – Bruce co-founded the PostgreSQL Global Development Group in 1996, helping transform PostgreSQL from an academic project into a top enterprise database.

A core team member and major contributor for decades, he has worked on features from MVCC to partitioning. Bruce is also PostgreSQL’s global evangelist: he spends much of his time educating developers and DBA’s through talks, blogs, and books. Despite his long tenure, he remains an active coder on the PostgreSQL core, reviewing patches and shaping the roadmap. As Senior Database Architect at EDB (EnterpriseDB), Bruce bridges enterprise needs with open-source development. His enduring code contributions and tireless advocacy for PostgreSQL make him one of the most influential database consultants in the world.

Dhruba Borthakur

Nationality: Indian

Dhruba Borthakur – Dhruba has played key roles in building cutting-edge data systems. He was a founding engineer of Apache Hadoop at Yahoo, where he wrote significant parts of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) – work that earned Hadoop the 2014 ACM Software System Award.

Later at Facebook, Dhruba co-created RocksDB, an embedded key-value store optimized for flash, which now underpins MyRocks and many other systems. In 2016, he co-founded Rockset, a real-time analytics database company, where he serves as CTO and actively codes the distributed SQL engine that ingests data streams. Dhruba’s knack for building robust, high-performance storage engines and his sustained contributions (from open-source code to research papers) make him one of the top practitioners in databases and big data infrastructure.

Eliot Horowitz

Nationality: American

Eliot Horowitz – Eliot is the co-founder and former CTO of MongoDB, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular MongoDB NoSQL database.

In 2007, Eliot (then in his early 20s) helped create MongoDB, writing large portions of its core in C++ and spearheading features like its flexible JSON-based query language and replication. He was the chief steward of MongoDB’s technical roadmap for over a decade, guiding it from a scrappy startup project to an enterprise-grade database used by millions of developers. Eliot remained deeply hands-on as CTO, often diving into code for critical sections like the query optimizer and sharding logic. In 2020, he stepped back from MongoDB to start a new venture (in robotics), but he continues to code and innovate in that space. Eliot’s impact on the database world – making NoSQL accessible to developers – and his ongoing passion for software engineering make him a standout figure in this list.

Emil Eifrem

Emil Eifrem - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

Nationality: Swedish

Emil Eifrem – Emil is the co-founder and CEO of Neo4j, the company behind the leading graph database of the same name. He envisioned the property graph model in 2000 (sketching the idea on a flight) and then brought it to life, pioneering the NoSQL graph database space.

Emil co-authored Graph Databases (O’Reilly) and has devoted his career to promoting graph technology. While he’s a CEO, he has maintained close involvement with Neo4j’s product direction and open-source community, ensuring the database remains developer-friendly. Emil’s balanced commitment to sustainable open source and his role in making graph databases a mainstream technology demonstrate why he’s a top database expert. He often speaks about graph use-cases and still occasionally dives into code or query languages (e.g., Cypher) to evolve the platform.

Sanjay Ghemawat

Nationality: American

Sanjay Ghemawat – Sanjay is a Google Senior Fellow and one of the principal engineers behind Google’s landmark distributed systems that underpin modern databases. He (with Jeff Dean) designed and implemented the Google File System (GFS) and MapReduce programming model, which in turn inspired Hadoop’s ecosystem.

Sanjay was also a co-author of the Bigtable paper – Bigtable being Google’s pioneering NoSQL wide-column store that influenced HBase and Cassandra. Additionally, he co-developed LevelDB, a fast key-value storage library used in Chrome and many databases. Known for writing extremely efficient C++ code, Sanjay still spends much of his time coding at Google, improving infrastructure that scales across Google’s datacenters. He has received accolades like the ACM Prize in Computing for his work. Though not customer-facing, Sanjay’s contributions form the backbone of countless data services. His sustained excellence in building core data storage and processing engines firmly places him among the world’s top database and systems architects.

Matei Zaharia

It’s important to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world systems — that’s where real impact happens.

Nationality: Romanian

Matei Zaharia – Matei is best known as the creator of Apache Spark, a general-purpose cluster computing engine that has become essential for big data processing. He developed Spark as a grad student at UC Berkeley, open-sourced it, and co-founded Databricks to further its development.

Spark’s in-memory data engine and easy APIs (in Scala/Python/SQL) dramatically sped up iterative algorithms and became a cornerstone of many data pipelines. Matei has also contributed to Apache Mesos (cluster manager) and more recently Delta Lake (a storage layer for ACID in data lakes). As CTO at Databricks and professor at Stanford, Matei continues to influence the direction of data systems – for example, leading research on optimizing ML workloads on data platforms. He still gets involved in coding strategic projects (notably, he was involved in developing Structured Streaming in Spark). With a rare combination of academic insight and real-world impact (Spark is one of the most active Apache projects), Matei is undeniably among the top data infrastructure consultants of this generation.

Avi Kivity

Avi Kivity - Top 17 Database Consultants for Hire

Nationality: Israeli

Avi Kivity – Avi is the co-founder and CTO of ScyllaDB, a high-performance NoSQL database compatible with Cassandra. A legendary systems programmer, Avi was the original creator of the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM hypervisor) before turning his attention to databases.

At ScyllaDB, he led the development of Scylla’s core in C++17, crafting a shard-per-core design that can leverage modern multi-core hardware more efficiently than Java-based Cassandra. Avi remains an active coder, tackling low-level optimization, OS integration, and even developing a new programming language (Seastar framework) to support Scylla’s asynchronous model. His expertise in squeezing every drop of performance from hardware and applying it to NoSQL data stores makes him one of the most formidable database engineers today.

Yoshinori Matsunobu

Nationality: Japanese

Yoshinori Matsunobu – Yoshinori is a renowned database engineer best known for creating MyRocks, the RocksDB storage engine for MySQL at Facebook.

A longtime MySQL performance expert (formerly at MySQL/Oracle and Percona), Yoshi joined Facebook and led the effort to replace InnoDB with RocksDB for certain workloads, vastly improving write efficiency. He open-sourced MyRocks and continues to tune it as part of the Facebook (Meta) database team. Yoshinori has also contributed to other database improvements at scale, from replication enhancements to backup tools. He remains an active coder at Meta, pushing MySQL to its limits in web-scale environments. He frequently shares his work at Percona Live and on his blog, making his deep knowledge accessible. For bridging open-source databases with production at massive scale, Yoshinori is highly respected in the database community.

Neha Narkhede

Nationality: Indian

Neha Narkhede – Neha is a co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder of Confluent, Inc. While at LinkedIn, Neha was part of the small team that designed and built Kafka, which became the world’s most popular streaming data platform.

She then started Confluent to build a company around Kafka, acting as CTO and driving its development to cater to enterprise needs. A skilled engineer, Neha has authored numerous Kafka improvement proposals and remains involved in the project’s direction. She is also one of the most prominent women in the database/streaming field, frequently speaking about data architectures. Though Confluent has grown, Neha’s technical fingerprints on Kafka (in scalability, replication, and ordering guarantees) and her ongoing advocacy for stream processing keep her on the list of top database and data infrastructure experts.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent.
However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

Ready to get started?