Vladimir Rodionov

Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Cloudera

About

I’m a senior backend engineer with 15+ years of experience in big data infrastructure, high-performance systems, and Java/C development. Earlier in my career, I worked on large-scale distributed systems and contributed to open-source projects like Apache HBase and Apache Presto (Velociraptor) — both with 5K+ GitHub stars. My focus areas included data ingestion, performance optimization, and backend resilience at scale. In recent years, I’ve specialized in data caching and memory efficiency. I built Memcarrot, a Memcached-compatible caching server optimized for low memory usage and SSD-friendly persistence, along with membench, a benchmarking tool that simulates billion-object datasets to measure cache performance.Most recently, I created MC/DC (Memory Compression / Dictionary Compression) — an open-source Memcached and Redis/Valkey module that integrates Zstandard dictionary compression directly into caching servers. MC/DC supports per-namespace compression, hot dictionary reloads, and replication-safe operation, offering major RAM savings and cost reductions for memory-bound workloads.I’m passionate about efficient data systems, performance engineering, and open-source innovation that makes infrastructure leaner, faster, and more sustainable.

Country

United States

City

San Francisco Bay Area

Industry

Computer Software

Skill

C (Programming Language), Apache Spark Streaming, Big Data Analytics, Data Warehousing, Spring Framework, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Spring Boot, Amazon EC2, Amazon Dynamodb, Amazon CloudWatch, PostgreSQL, Rust (Programming Language), Memcached, Redis, Azure Data Lake, Cloud Storage, Presto, Founder, Entrepreneurship, Software as a Service (SaaS)

Experience

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Cloudera

2026-2 - Present · 8 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

Founder/Principal Engineer

Carrot Data, Inc.

2020-5 - 2026-2 · 5 yrs 10 mos

San Francisco, California, United States

• Designed and built Memcarrot, a next-generation, Memcached-compatible caching server offering up to 5× greater memory efficiency than Redis or Memcached, with comparable performance and latency under high-throughput workloads. • Engineered custom compression, low-overhead object management, and an SSD-optimized disk engine with minimal write amplification. • Developed a SaaS platform for Memcarrot on Amazon AWS, supporting full operational lifecycle: • User management (registration, authentication, credential rotation) • Cluster orchestration (startup, shutdown, scale in/out/up/down) • Billing integration, usage-based metering, and subscription tracking • Metrics and alerts, with admin APIs and TLS-enabled endpoints • Built key infrastructure using Java, Spring Boot, Docker, and Heroku-compatible deployment pipelines • Created supporting tools including membench, a benchmarking utility simulating billions of cached objects across varying workloads

Staff Software Engineer

Readyset

2023-4 - 2024-5 · 1 yr 2 mos

United States

Contributed to the development of ReadySet’s SQL caching engine for PostgreSQL and MySQL, designed to accelerate read-heavy workloads with transparent query caching. • Focused on memory usage optimization, profiling and analyzing in-memory object layouts and data structures to reduce overhead in cache storage. • Proposed and prototyped a custom compression scheme tailored to the access patterns and structure of cached SQL results, achieving 8–10× memory efficiency improvements in preliminary benchmarks. • The compression design was later evolved and adopted in my Memcarrot project. • Collaborated cross-functionally with query engine and storage layer teams to align memory optimizations with system-level performance goals.

Staff Software Engineer

Cloudera

2019-1 - 2020-5 · 1 yr 5 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

Worked on open source development in the Hadoop ecosystem, primarily focusing on Hadoop, HBase, and related infrastructure components. • Provided support and implementation guidance to enterprise customers using a broad set of tools including Spark, Presto, Kafka, NiFi, and Airflow, helping with integration, configuration, and troubleshooting in real-world environments. • Assisted in optimizing performance and stability across distributed systems and helped customers navigate deployment challenges at scale. • Collaborated with internal teams to investigate production issues, apply patches, and contribute improvements back to open source where appropriate. • Gained broad exposure to data platform operations and system tuning across multiple layers of the data stack.