# Benjamin Wagner

> Benjamin Wagner is VP of Engineering (listed as CEO in some directories) at Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse built for speed. A computer scientist trained at Technical University of Munich, Wagner moved from academic database research and a Snowflake internship directly into building Firebolt's query engine from the ground up. He is the author of InkFuse, an experimental database runtime that unifies vectorized and compiled query execution, and a regular speaker at CMU's database seminar series. His work sits at the intersection of high-performance analytics and open standards, particularly around Apache Iceberg and PostgreSQL compliance.

- **Role:** VP of Engineering at Firebolt
- **Organizations:** Firebolt, Technical University of Munich, Snowflake (intern)
- **Nationality:** German
- **Education:** Master of Science, Computer Science, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, Technical University of Munich (TUM)
- **Known for:** Led query processing engineering at Firebolt, helping it achieve up to 36x faster analytics at 5% of traditional warehouse cost, Created InkFuse, an experimental database runtime unifying vectorized and compiled query execution (open-source, C++), Co-authored academic paper: 'Incremental Fusion: Unifying Compiled and Vectorized Query Execution'

## Career timeline

- **2018-2019** — Undergraduate at TU Munich; first exposure to database systems research
- **2019-2021** — Team Lead in Query Processing at TU Munich; collaborated on adaptive workload management for the Umbra database system
- **~2020** — Software Engineer Intern at Snowflake, focusing on high-performance query processing
- **2021** — Joined Firebolt as an early engineering leader (May 2021); began building out the query engine
- **2021** — Gave 'How We Build Firebolt' tech talk at CMU Database Group (December 2021)
- **2022** — Firebolt raised Series C at $1.4B valuation ($100M round, January 2022)
- **2023** — Completed MSc in Computer Science at TU Munich while working at Firebolt
- **2025** — Speaker at Data + AI Summit 2025 (Databricks) on analytics and BI
- **2025** — Spoke at CMU on 'Why Powering User Facing Applications on Iceberg is Hard' (November 2025)
- **2025** — Firebolt Core (free, self-hosted edition) launched
- **2026** — Speaker at Iceberg Summit 2026

## Achievements

- Led query processing engineering at Firebolt, helping it achieve up to 36x faster analytics at 5% of traditional warehouse cost
- Created InkFuse, an experimental database runtime unifying vectorized and compiled query execution (open-source, C++)
- Co-authored academic paper: 'Incremental Fusion: Unifying Compiled and Vectorized Query Execution'
- Joined Firebolt as an early engineering leader and helped scale it to a $1.4B valuation company
- Regular invited speaker at Carnegie Mellon University database seminar series
- Published technical blog series on making a query engine PostgreSQL-compliant
- Speaker at Databricks Data + AI Summit 2025
- Speaker at Iceberg Summit 2026
- Built AnyBlob, an open-source cloud object storage download manager optimized for analytics workloads

## Latest updates

- **2026-01** — Featured speaker at Iceberg Summit 2026, discussing Firebolt's approach to Apache Iceberg-powered user-facing analytics
- **2025-11** — Delivered CMU Database Seminar talk: 'Firebolt: Why Powering User Facing Applications on Iceberg is Hard'
- **2025-06** — Spoke at Databricks Data + AI Summit 2025 in the Analytics and BI track
- **2025-03** — Firebolt Core (free, self-hosted edition of Firebolt) officially launched
- **2022-01** — Firebolt raised $100M Series C at $1.4B valuation

## Links

- Website: https://firebolt.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wagjamin/
- GitHub: https://github.com/wagjamin

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/benjamin-wagner
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-18