About

Chris Stevens is an accomplished software engineering manager with over 13 years of experience in the industry. Currently, he is the Engineering Manager at Databricks, where he manages a team working on Databricks SQL, a compute layer that provides data warehouse performance on top of data lakes. He is responsible for overseeing the control plane services that manage the underlying compute resources, solving problems around autoscaling, query scheduling, query/session state management, and seamless updates to the query engine. Prior to his current role, Chris served as the Senior Software Engineer at Databricks, where he worked on the cloud compute fabric behind Databricks Runtime, including instance management, Apache Spark cluster auto-scaling, cloud storage auto-scaling/performance, and cluster start performance. He also drove the Instance Pools feature from problem statement to architecture to launch through post-launch adoption. Before joining Databricks, Chris co-founded Minoca, an open-source general-purpose operating system. As a co-founding engineer, he steered the product vision, architected and built large portions of the system, and analyzed and improved the performance of critical code paths. The system has generated over 2,000 stars and 150 forks on Github. Chris holds an A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard University. He is highly skilled in SQL, data warehousing, Spark, and software engineering. He is passionate about serving his team by listening, coaching, and providing opportunities for growth. Chris is an excellent communicator and problem-solver, always looking for ways to improve processes and deliver exceptional results.