Benjamin Lamothe

Software Engineer and System Architect: Databases and Distributed Systems

19 years building databases and distributed systems, specializing in query engines and optimization, data storage and indexing, and consensus protocols. Most recently, hybrid graph, vector, and full-text retrieval for AI workloads. Twice a venture-backed co-founder (YC S12). B.S. in theoretical mathematics from MIT.

Experience

Chief Architect

Fluree

January 2024 – PresentBrooklyn, NY (Remote)

  • Set the architectural direction of the Fluree Core Database, a distributed system with independently scaled query peers
  • Built a federated query layer presenting graph, vector, and full-text indexes across heterogeneous local and remote storage back ends as a single logical database, providing the hybrid retrieval substrate for AI workloads
  • Designed a cost-based query optimizer that reorders and rewrites user queries using cardinality estimates derived from index statistics
  • Owned query execution, optimization, and indexing for a ground-up rewrite of the database in Rust, undertaken for throughput and fine-grained memory control
  • Added Raft-based replication on openraft, implementing the log storage, state machine, and snapshot layers against the engine’s storage
  • Restructured the system into a modular, fault-tolerant architecture separating storage, indexing, and query execution

Technical Lead, Core Database

Fluree

September 2022 – January 2024Brooklyn, NY (Remote)

  • Led a team of four database engineers with mentorship through weekly 1 on 1 meetings and code review
  • Built the core query processing engine and declarative query language on top of the streaming index layer, using transducers to process datasets larger than available memory

Senior Software Engineer

Fluree

September 2020 – September 2022Brooklyn, NY (Remote)

  • Designed and implemented a streaming re-indexing system that merges persisted indexes with in-memory novelty in constant memory, independent of database size
  • Wrote an SQL parser and transpiler allowing users already familiar with SQL to query Fluree databases

Co-founder and CTO

Quorum Control

April 2018 – September 2020Brooklyn, NY (Remote)

  • Led a fully remote development team building a distributed platform using a novel Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm that supported a throughput of 200 transactions per second with 144 millisecond finality on 21 nodes
  • Wrote SDKs in Go, JavaScript, and WebAssembly allowing third party developers to build decentralized applications on the platform

Senior Software Engineer

DemocracyWorks

January 2017 – April 2018Brooklyn, NY (Remote)

  • Built Clojure micro-services to send millions of user notifications for United States voter registration and election information on peak days
  • Mentored multiple junior developers on the team through pair programming, code review, and regular 1 on 1 discussions

Independent Software Contractor

August 2014 – January 2017New York, NY

  • Migrated a legacy CakePHP healthcare web application to Ruby on Rails, then built and managed a HIPAA compliant and fault-tolerant AWS infrastructure for the new application (Spreemo)
  • Performed code quality audits and security reviews across multiple client engagements
  • Developed a declarative AWS deployment infrastructure (Vitals)
  • Designed a candidate interview process and recruited two full-time engineers (Spreemo)

Co-Founder and Lead Software Engineer

Amicus (Y Combinator S12)

February 2012 – July 2014New York, NY

  • Developed a Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js web application for non-profits and political organizations to better engage their supporters
  • Developed a JRuby Object-Graph Mapping for property graph databases in Rails applications using the TinkerPop API
  • Built a Ruby console that allowed for fully automated deployment and provisioning of Amazon EC2 instances.

Software Engineer

Visible Measures

September 2007 – March 2011Boston, MA

  • Developed and maintained a high-performance, scalable, and distributed analytics engine with Hadoop on 60+ node cloud compute clusters to process dozens of Terabytes of video stream viewership data daily
  • Implemented and managed a sharded data warehouse based on MySQL and later Vertica database management systems

Research Assistant

M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

January 2006 – May 2007Cambridge, MA

  • Worked under Professor Patrick Winston to build a natural language understanding system that parsed English sentences into syntactic representations, extracted structured knowledge through pattern recognition, and generated visual animations of described events
  • Surveyed knowledge representation schemes in the Cognitive Linguistics literature and developed novel knowledge representations through analysis of English sentence structure

Education

B.S. in Mathematics (Theoretical)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

June 2007Cambridge, MA

Awards

Y Combinator FounderSummer 2012

Forbes 30 under 302012 and 2013

Systems

Query Optimization Storage Engines Indexing Distributed Consensus Vector Search Full-Text Search Knowledge Graphs Streaming

SQL AWS Hadoop Vertica WebAssembly

Code in Production

Clojure Rust Go JavaScript Java Ruby