Stu Hood is Head of Engineering at ParadeDB, where he is building a Postgres-native alternative to Elasticsearch. He focuses on bridging the gap between transactional workloads and high-performance search by integrating Tantivy (a Rust-based search library) directly into PostgreSQL.
Stu’s background is rooted in distributed storage systems. He was an early contributor to Apache Cassandra and has designed storage and log-search infrastructure using Apache Hadoop and Lucene. He is a strong advocate for using Rust to build safe, performant database internals and extensions.