performance-engineering
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Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner is the co-founder and CEO of Espresso AI, a New York startup building what it calls the first neural compute optimizer - software that uses large language models to rewrite SQL and reallocate compute so companies cut their Snowflake and Databricks bills by up to 70%. A former Google and DeepMind engineer who worked on search, storage infrastructure, and early code-LLM research, Lerner left Big Tech to merge the two halves of his career - machine learning and systems performance - into a single product. Espresso launched from stealth in May 2024 with over $11 million in seed funding from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and FirstMark's Matt Turck.
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg is an Australian systems performance engineer at OpenAI, where he works on datacenter optimizations for ChatGPT. He invented flame graphs and the USE Method, pioneered eBPF observability, and is the author of landmark books including 'Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud'. His work is credited with saving the industry over $1 billion in compute costs. Previously an Intel Fellow and performance engineering leader at Netflix, Gregg is one of the most influential engineers in Linux and cloud infrastructure.
Nelson Elhage
Nelson Elhage is a systems engineer turned AI safety researcher who has left fingerprints across the modern software stack. At Anthropic, he co-authored foundational work on mechanistic interpretability and transformer circuits that shaped how the field understands language models. Before that, he was employee ~30 at Stripe and a founding engineer of Sorbet, the Ruby typechecker now used across one of the world's largest payment platforms. His open-source tools - reptyr, livegrep, and ministrace - are staples in the Linux hacker's toolkit. He blogs at 'Made of Bugs' and runs a Buttondown newsletter on computer systems.