Rebecca Taft is the Director of SQL Engineering at Cockroach Labs. During her 8 years at the company, she helped build the cost-based query optimizer from scratch and added support for features such as geospatial indexing and locality-optimized search in multi-region clusters. Prior to joining Cockroach Labs, she was a graduate student at MIT, where she worked with Professor Michael Stonebraker researching distributed database elasticity and multi-tenancy. Becca holds a B.S. in Physics from Yale University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.