Nikhil Benesch has spent over a decade working on database systems. He was an early engineer at Cockroach Labs, focused on distributed SQL, and went on to serve as CTO of Materialize, where he led development of a streaming database built on incremental computation. He is an active open-source contributor, with projects spanning SQL tooling, systems programming in Rust, and developer utilities. Nikhil is now CTO of turbopuffer, a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage and used by companies like Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion.