Andrew Kimball is a Fellow at Cockroach Labs, where he helps shape the architecture of CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database trusted by some of the world's largest enterprises. Over a 25-year career building core infrastructure at Microsoft, Square, and Cockroach Labs, he has worked across data access technologies, payments and merchant financing, and distributed databases.
His eight years at Cockroach Labs have spanned some of the company's most significant technical bets. He designed and led the development of CockroachDB's cost-based SQL optimizer from the ground up, then went on to lead the team that built CockroachDB Serverless — a system where databases scale seamlessly from zero to very large within a shared, multi-tenant fabric. More recently, his focus has shifted to AI workloads, where he led the design and implementation of CockroachDB's vector indexing. He also holds more than 26 patents spanning distributed databases, query optimization, and payment infrastructure.
Much of his recent thinking centers on how the assumptions baked into today's databases hold up (or don't) as software systems become more autonomous, continuous, and operated at machine speed.
