Meet Our 2025 StarRocks Award Recipients!

 

Each year, the StarRocks Awards celebrate the engineers, builders, storytellers, and community champions who shape our fast-growing global ecosystem. These awards aren’t just about recognizing great work—they’re about honoring the passion, creativity, and collaboration that make StarRocks what it is today.

 

The 2025 edition marks our most global and inspiring celebration yet. From writing code and pushing technical boundaries to sharing real-world case studies, organizing meetups, translating content, answering questions, and advocating for StarRocks in local communities, our contributors continue to redefine what’s possible in real-time analytics.

 

Every contribution matters. Every voice strengthens the community.

 

Nominated by the community and approved by the StarRocks Technical Steering Committee, here are the outstanding winners of the 2025 StarRocks Awards, the individuals who have truly elevated, inspired, and redefined what’s possible with StarRocks:

StarRocks Community Star Ambassadors

This award goes to the passionate community leaders who lead with generosity, expertise, and enthusiasm—lifting others and helping the community grow.

Anton Borisov, Principal Data Architect @Fresha

Anton Borisov led the first StarRocks production deployment in the UK, helping establish modern best practices for high-performance OLAP, CDC, and lakehouse analytics. Through widely read technical articles, conference talks, and community engagement, he has contributed to the adoption of StarRocks across Europe.

Byung Ju (Edward) Kim, Solution Engineer @CloudShift

Edward actively champions StarRocks in Korea by organizing user groups and study sessions, translating content, delivering talks, and sharing practical real-world use cases. He also runs the StarRocks Korea community site, offering tutorials and localized documentation. 

Eric Sun, Head of Data Platform @Coinbase

Eric is an active advocate for StarRocks, helping the broader community understand how it powers Coinbase’s blockchain analytics use cases and how to achieve data-warehouse-level performance on a data lakehouse.

Huong Vuong, Senior Data Engineer @Grab

Huong is an active contributor to the StarRocks community. He spoke at the StarRocks Singapore Meetup and authored the blogs "Building a Spark observability product with StarRocks: Real-time and historical performance analysis" & “Get Familiar with StarRocks in 4 Hours.”

Jorge Novo, Data Engineer @CVS Health

Jorge doesn’t just use StarRocks—he champions it.

He encourages teams and stakeholders to evaluate and adopt StarRocks, openly shares his learnings to help more engineers understand how it solves real-time analytics challenges, and serves as a vital bridge between user needs and the engineering community: providing feedback that accelerates product improvement.

Nick Reich, Principal Software Engineer @Demandbase

Nick is an active advocate for StarRocks, sharing valuable insights based on Demandbase’s adoption of the platform. His experience helps the community understand practical use cases and the benefits of StarRocks in real-world data environments.

Stanislav Lysikov, Head of Data Office @Space307

Stanislav actively promotes StarRocks within his local tech communities by delivering talks and serving as a reliable resource for users seeking guidance. He also plays a key role in localizing StarRocks for the European community, helping broaden its reach and adoption in the region.

Suresh Bysani, Engineering Leader @Palo Alto Networks (Ex-Eightfold.ai)

Suresh is an active advocate for StarRocks, sharing his experience on how Eightfold.ai leverages the platform. His contributions offer valuable real-world insights that help the community better understand StarRocks’ capabilities and benefits.

Vijay Shekhawat, Staff Software Engineer @TRM Labs

Vijay plays a key role in advancing StarRocks’ presence in blockchain analytics, championing innovation and helping expand its adoption across the industry. He has authored a detailed blog post and spoken at several events, including the Apache Iceberg Summit and StarRocks Summit, contributing significantly to the community’s growth and technical depth.

StarRocks Community Star Builders

This award recognizes the innovators and problem-solvers who strengthen the StarRocks ecosystem through their technical contributions—building tools, features, and improvements that help the entire community move faster and go further.

Casey Luo, Software Engineer @Celerdata

Casey has driven key enhancements in StarRocks’ shared-data engine: from enabling PK parallel execution, optimizing I/O usage by introducing file bundle format, and hardening compaction flows, all contributing to more performant and stable shared-data operations at scale.

Connor Brennan, Software Engineer @Pinterest

Connor's contributions make StarRocks more correct, more reliable, and more efficient, especially for shared-data deployments and time-partitioned workloads.

Jerry Jiang, Software Engineer @Mirrorship

Jerry Jiang has consistently delivered high-impact performance improvements that meaningfully advance the speed and efficiency of StarRocks. His contributions target real bottlenecks across execution, storage, and planner layers, resulting in faster queries, more stable workloads, and measurable gains for production deployments.

Kaijian Ding, StarRocks Lead @Dewu App

Kaijian Ding has made well-rounded and impactful contributions to StarRocks over the past year, focusing on both feature development and system stability. He enhanced query management by enabling users to terminate queries using custom identifiers, and improved reliability through fixes to materialized view refresh behavior and partition pruning accuracy. In addition to his technical work, he actively engaged with the community by reporting, labeling, and helping triage critical bugs.

Mingxu Hu, Data Warehouse Engineer@Boss Zhipin

Mingxu has been working on usability, stability, and integrations (query monitoring/progress, Paimon support, safety checks). He is a productive community contributor with multiple commits over the past year, covering feature enhancements, bug fixes, and backend improvements.

Murphy Wang, Software Engineer @Celerdata

Murphy's work makes StarRocks’ JSON analytics more crash-proof, MV-aware, and reliable—especially for flat JSON extraction and JSON path–based optimizations in real workloads.

Rohit Satardekar, Architect @Huawei Cloud

Rohit has contributed significantly to the reliability and usability of StarRocks, particularly in data ingestion and type correctness. His work includes enhancing StreamLoad robustness in multilingual environments, streamlining administrative operations such as partition recovery, and ensuring accurate data type handling during conversions, making StarRocks more stable and user-friendly for diverse production scenarios.

Wayne Yang, Software Engineer @Celerdata

Wayne has made substantial, foundational contributions to how StarRocks interacts with Iceberg tables and catalogs, especially around security, catalog access, table procedures, and version upgrades. While his commits focus on Iceberg integration today, they directly support the broader vision of unified governance (via Polaris/Unity) by building out the technical groundwork necessary for a governed, multi-engine lakehouse ecosystem.

Xueyang Wu, Software Engineer @Alibaba Cloud

Over the past year, Xueyang has made impactful contributions that strengthened both the reliability and capabilities of StarRocks. His work spans meaningful feature enhancements—such as expanding hash-function support, improving materialized-view behavior for lakehouse tables, enabling conditional updates, and introducing a new text-search capability that broadens StarRocks’ analytical use cases. He also delivered important stability fixes across storage, indexing, and query execution, along with valuable testing and debugging tools that improve system correctness and make it easier for engineers to diagnose issues in large-scale environments.

Yan Duan, Software Engineer @Shopee

Yan Duan made significant contributions to StarRocks by improving SQL compatibility with other query engines, such as Trino, and enhancing external data ingestion, particularly around handling complex data types from text-based sources. Beyond code, he also played an active role in community engagement as a speaker at the StarRocks Meetup in Singapore, helping the community grow local awareness and adoption.

Zhenghua Li, Senior DevOps @Walmart China

Zhenghua has contributed a wide range of practical tools that significantly improve the StarRocks user experience, including:

• StarRocks Native ↔ Apache Ranger Permission Conversion Tool
• StarRocks DDL Permission Recovery Tool
• StarRocks Slow Query Interception Tool
• StarRocks Cross-Cluster Data Migration Tool
• StarRocks Permission Visualization Tool

His contributions make StarRocks more secure, more manageable, and more user-friendly for real-world deployments.

StarRocks Community All-Stars

They are exceptional contributors who embody the spirit of both innovation and community. They not only build and improve StarRocks through meaningful technical contributions, but also elevate the community by sharing knowledge, advocating for best practices, and actively supporting users.

Hector Gonzalez, Principal Software Engineer @Celonis

As the overall lead driving Celonis’ adoption of StarRocks, Hector has played a pivotal role in shaping real-world production use cases for the community. His contributions, particularly around array functionality and spill, have delivered valuable insights and inspired new ideas across the ecosystem. He also shared Celonis’ journey and best practices in his talk at StarRocks Summit 2025, further helping users understand how to apply StarRocks effectively at scale.

Hongkun Xu, Senior Software Engineer @Cisco

Hongkun has made significant contributions to StarRocks by enabling rack-aware resource isolation within clusters, extending the inverted index operators, and improving the usability of Flat JSON handling. These enhancements have greatly strengthened both query performance and overall ease of use in StarRocks. He also spoke at StarRocks Connect 2025, where he shared Cisco Webex’s real-world practices and insights on using StarRocks at scale.

Jie Chen, Infrastructure Engineer @ypshengxian

In the past year, Jie has focused on strengthening StarRocks’ reliability and tooling, especially for complex deployments. His work includes improving materialized view behavior, fixing critical self-union join issues, and sharing robust debugging and build workflows. He also contributes valuable documentation, triage support, and numerous blogs that share his StarRocks journey and best practices to help users succeed.

Zhimin Ren, Senior Data Platform Engineer @Qunar.com

He has made impactful contributions to StarRocks through both engineering work and knowledge sharing. On the technical side, he delivered several valuable improvements, including enabling incremental scans for external tables to accelerate queries, enhancing observability through better diagnostic tooling, and optimizing partition pruning to avoid unnecessary full-table scans. These contributions collectively strengthened StarRocks’ performance, usability, and operational visibility.

Thank you to all of the contributors! ❤️

As we conclude this year’s winner highlights, we once again extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the contributors who were selected. We also want to recognize the many contributors who were not included in this year’s list. Your efforts are deeply appreciated, and every contribution helps strengthen the community. 

 

We look forward to celebrating even more incredible contributions next year!