# Foyzur Rahman > Principal Engineer, Amazon Web Services Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/foyzur I have been working on distributed systems since 2013, specializing in analytics databases. I am fairly comfortable with many facets of such systems: metadata and transaction management, [federated] AuthN/AuthZ, planning, execution, isolation semantics, high availability, scalability, fault tolerance etc. I am also fairly familiar with various foundational AWS services such as Lake Formation, S3, ec2, DynamoDB, IAM, SSO along with other internal services that serve as building blocks. I have been a core contributor or team lead of multiple Amazon Redshift re:Invent features: concurrency scaling, Redshift Data Sharing, Redshift Serverless. I also led 2022 re:Invent launch: Lake Formation managed Redshift datashares. These days I am mostly focused on reimagining Redshift that can unlock major values for our customers. Before starting my exciting journey of developing Big data engines I completed my Ph.D. in Software Engineering at the University of California, Davis where I worked with Professor Prem Devanbu. My dissertation was about the misalignments of software quality models involving extensive mining of open source software project data using statistics, machine learning and data mining techniques; and finding various caveats in the process as well as the resulting misalignments of the models. — “Historically, disruptive technologies involve no new technologies; rather, they consist of components built around proven technologies and put together in a novel product architecture that offers the customer a set of attributes never before available.” - Clayton Christensen ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2022 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States Reimagining Redshift. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 Designed the distributed catalog layer for Redshift data sharing. Led a team to implement the same. Lot more fancy features are yet to come (stay tuned)! For publicly announced data sharing feature refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/datashare-overview.html Helped the team delivering Redshift serverless. Led a team across multiple AWS services to deliver LakeFormation governed Redshift datasharing. Made Redshift under the hood startup time several times faster to improve customer experience as well as to cut down cost on AWS side. ### Software Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Core contributor of Redshift concurrency scaling execution engine (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-concurrency-scaling-for-amazon-redshift-peak-performance-at-all-times). Worked on many parts such as distributed execution logic, planning, storage layer portability etc. Worked on other critical components such as Spectrum and AQUA. ### Committer, Apache HAWQ @ The Apache Software Foundation Jan 2015 – Present Worked on query processing engine for Apache HAWQ. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Pivotal Software, Inc. Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 | Palo Alto, CA Numerous contributions in design and implementation of different subsystems. Lead query execution team for Greenplum Database. Won multiple company awards and was awarded US patent# 10037144. Some of my projects are: Design and implementation of memory accounting framework to accurately track memory usage across different subsystems. The framework also provides collaborative logging across multiple sessions to snapshot system memory usage as required. Design and implementation of runaway query termination framework to detect and terminate queries with abusive resource usage pattern. Design and implementation of a resilient join operator that can intelligently adopt different join algorithms, including nested loop join and hash join. The resilient join operator can also detect skew, swap inner and outer (if permitted), adopt different hashing functions, dynamically spill different subsets of hash buckets and coalesce such spilled buckets to maximize the utilization of available memory. Design and implementation of an unified dynamic scan operator that significantly reduced spaghetti code across several different partitioned and non-partitioned scan operators for relations and indexes. Redesign and implementation of bitmap scan to reduce memory usage by orders of magnitude by establishing a clean cross-operator memory ownership model across BitmapAnd/BitmapOr, the BitmapTableScan and BitmapIndexScan. Optimization of idle session memory consumption to bring down gigabytes of leaking memory to a constant few megabytes (earned a platinum recognition award for this). Contributed to numerous design discussions and customer bug fixes. ### Graduate Student Researcher @ UC Davis Jan 2009 – Jan 2013 | Davis, CA Empirical software engineering using statistics, machine learning and data mining. ### Graduate Teaching Assistant @ UC Davis Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Davis, CA, USA * Teaching assistant of Object Oriented Programming (C++) * Teaching assistant of Python programming language * Teaching assistant of Operating Systems ### Cisco Choice Ph.D. Intern @ Cisco Systems Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | San Jose, CA Meta-analysis of the validity of statistical models for the customer satisfaction survey data, particularly in the presence of gated questionnaire (skip pattern in survey questions) and missing data. ### Cisco Select Ph.D Intern @ Cisco Systems Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | San Jose, CA Statistical analysis on customer service request data for better decision making and optimized resource allocation. ### Chief Technology Officer @ Information Engineers & Consultants BD Ltd. Jan 2001 – Jan 2008 | Dhaka, Bangladesh * Overall decision making * Pre-bid technical project proposal writing for Government procurement (request for tender) including preliminary cost estimations and personnel planning * Project management * System analysis and design * Active development in multiple projects * Database administration of large Oracle databases * Research on intelligent (predictive) input method (keyboard interface for Bangla and English) * Research and development of an automated software testing tool ## Education ### Ph.D. in Computer Science University of California, Davis ### MS in Computer Science University of California, Davis ### BS in Computer Science and Engineering Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/foyzur --- Source: https://flows.cv/foyzur JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/foyzur/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12