He received his Ph.D. in 2013 at Brown University working on database management systems under the circumspect guidance of Stan Zdonik and Michael Stonebraker. While in New England, his research was focused on the development of the H-Store distributed transaction processing system (since commercialized as VoltDB). Before this, he was a systems programmer for the Condor Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Miron Livny.