Jordan Lewis

CTO

Brooklyn, New York, United States16 yrs 6 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Led engineering teams at Cockroach Labs.
Expert in database technologies and distributed systems.
Promoted multiple first-time managers into leadership roles.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS engineering leader with extensive experience in database technologies.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

PythonC++JavaLinuxCCassandraAmazon Web Services (AWS)ScalabilityRubyGitRESTDistributed SystemsRuby on RailsSubversion

About

I lead engineering at Cockroach Labs. If you're interested in database technologies, get in touch - I'd love to have coffee and talk about it!

Experience

Cockroach labs

6 roles

VP of Engineering

Promoted

Jul 2025 – Present · 8 mos

I am responsible for leading engineering at Cockroach Labs.

Senior Director of Engineering, CockroachDB Cloud

Promoted

Mar 2023 – Jul 2025 · 2 yrs 4 mos

Responsible for leading the CockroachDB Cloud engineering teams.

Director Of Engineering

Promoted

Jun 2021 – Apr 2023 · 1 yr 10 mos

As a Director of Engineering, I led the SQL, Disaster Recovery, and CDC (Change Data Capture) engineering teams. I was responsible for 6 teams, 5 managers, and 40+ people.
Promoted 3 first-time managers into leadership positions on the teams.
Added the existing Disaster Recovery and CDC teams to my organization to maximize collaboration between the teams.

Senior Engineering Manager

Promoted

Jan 2020 – Jul 2021 · 1 yr 6 mos

As a Senior Engineering Manager, I grew my scope of influence along with my team, becoming the leader for the 4 teams that are responsible for CockroachDB's SQL implementation. I expanded my team from around 7 direct reports to about 13, including 3 managers by the middle of 2021.
Created, staffed and incubated the SQL Schema team, which is responsible for CockroachDB's always-online, non-blocking schema change infrastructure and catalog management. Promoted a manager to directly manage this team.
Promoted a manager to take on the team of engineers responsible for session management, driver and ORM integration, and SQL "front-end" feature development.
Took on the engineering team responsible for the CockroachDB SQL Optimizer, alongside the execution engine. Re-organized these teams into a single SQL Queries team.
Created, staffed and incubated a SQL Observability team, which is responsible for full-stack observability for CockroachDB.

Engineering Manager

Promoted

Mar 2018 – Jan 2020 · 1 yr 10 mos

I was TLM for the SQL Execution team, which was responsible for CockroachDB's SQL Execution engine.
Unified 2 competing SQL implementations (local and distributed)
Prototyped and led the implementation of CockroachDB's vectorized SQL engine, a state of the art computation model that improved execution performance by orders of magnitude

Member Of Technical Staff

Jun 2016 – Mar 2018 · 1 yr 9 mos

I was employee #25 at Cockroach Labs, working as an IC generalist on various projects at the company. I mostly focused on CockroachDB's SQL implementation, building features, improving compatibility, improving performance, and so on.
I also migrated Cockroach Labs' CI infrastructure off of an aging CircleCI implementation onto a self-hosted TeamCity infrastructure, which is still around 6 years later.

Work-bench

Next NYC Network

Sep 2022 – Present · 3 yrs 6 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

I provide part-time technical advisory services for the investment team at Work-Bench, including due diligence assistance and portfolio company support.

Knewton

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 2011 – Jun 2016 · 4 yrs 9 mos

Senior Software Engineer (Core Platform and Core Models Engineering): February 2013 – June 2016 (3 years)
Led and completed a large-scale redesign of the in-house framework supporting the company's real-time production machine-learning model infrastructure, resulting in a 50% cost reduction and improved latency, throughput and overall system simplicity over 6 months
Created audit and management system for model parameters learned offline
Work with data scientists to profile, instrument and optimize critical model code
Design, implement and maintain a central model-running service along with architecture of supporting backend databases, caches, auditable logs and other metrics and instrumentation
Software Engineer (Core Platform): September 2011 – February 2013 (1.5 years)
Responsible for design, implementation, maintenance and optimization of core backend database services in a Java-based, AWS-hosted microservice-style distributed system.
Created a scalable versioned graph database using Cassandra as its backing store
Created a service to manage, persist and serve a complex set of domain objects for internal use.

Manticore, the university of chicago

Intern Software Developer

Jun 2010 – Sep 2010 · 3 mos

Computation institute, the university of chicago

System Administrator

Aug 2008 – Sep 2009 · 1 yr 1 mo

Google and vim

Software Developer

Jun 2008 – Sep 2008 · 3 mos

I was an intern software developer for Google and Vim in Google's 2008 Summer of Code program. I designed and implemented Vim's undo persistence feature (http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/undo.html#undo-persistence) under the mentorship of Vim's maintainer Bram Moolenaar.