Sienna Meridian Satterwhite

Principal Engineer · Distributed Systems

Currently building CesiumDB — a high-performance LSM-tree key-value store in Rust.

What I Do

I build distributed systems that operate at scale. My work focuses on database internals, consensus algorithms, low-level networking, and real-time data replication. I specialize in the kind of infrastructure that needs to work 24/7/365 — no exceptions.

Primary languages: Rust, Go
Core domains: Distributed databases · Consensus protocols · Protocol development · Systems programming

// The problems I solve
enum Focus {
    DatabaseInternals,        // LSM-trees, storage engines, durability
    ConsensusAlgorithms,      // Raft, Paxos, distributed coordination
    LowLatencyNetworking,     // Custom protocols, microsecond response times
    DistributedOrchestration, // Fault tolerance, high availability
}

Background

Former operations lead for AWS Lambda deployment infrastructure. Built systems at VMware, Pivotal, and led technical compliance architecture at Wells Fargo for 250,000 people. Designed and deployed infrastructure for coronavirus.gov during the pandemic. Spoke at Microsoft Build and VMworld on cloud-native architectures.

Before all that: United States Marine Corps, Operation Enduring Freedom.

Now in Portugal working on a next-generation public cloud from scratch. ✨

Research Interests

• Database design
• Consensus protocol implementations for high-throughput systems
• Real-time distributed decision-making for embedded IoT
• Hybrid consistency models for geo-distributed databases

Open Source

Contributing to projects I respect:

• bevyengine/bevy — Data-driven game engine in Rust
• dotnet/orleans — Distributed actor framework
• Vulkan ecosystem

Publications:

• Consistency with Cthulhu
• Deploying and Scaling Out a Distributed Build System for Release Engineering Management

Beyond Code

Marine. Engineer. Lesbian. Asylum Seeker.

"Build systems that don't break. Tickle code to make it laugh. Deploy infrastructure that doesn't fail."