Steve Tarzia

About

My main page is at https://www.stevetarzia.com.

Experience

• MongoDB (Hybrid)
  • Senior Staff Engineer
    May 2026 - Present · 2 mos

    Hands-on technical leader within the MongoDB Query Engineering team.

  • Director of Engineering
    Feb 2023 - Apr 2026 · 3 yrs 3 mos

    Director of Query Optimization. I was a manager of managers for a team adapting ideas from traditional relational query optimization to MongoDB's schema-less document model. My team included engineers working in both the U.S. and Europe.

  • Software Engineering Lead
    Dec 2021 - Feb 2023 · 1 yr 3 mos

    I was a hands-on technical manager for small teams in Query Optimization and Query Execution in MongoDB's core open-source C++ codebase.

• Sr. Engineering Manager at Ocient
  Mar 2021 - Dec 2021 · 10 mos

  Managed a team of 12 talented backend software engineers working on the storage, indexing and networking components of a petabyte-scale analytics database engine.

• Assistant Professor of Instruction in CS, Director of MS Programs in CE and EE at Northwestern University
  Sep 2017 - Mar 2021 · 3 yrs 7 mos

  Winner of 2019-2020 "Computer Science Instructor of the Year" award. Taught classes on Scalable Software Architectures, Networking, Operating Systems, and Data Management. Handled MS program admissions and advised MS students.

• Sr. Computational Research Consultant at Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management
  Feb 2017 - Aug 2017 · 7 mos

  Helped business-school professors and Ph.D. students do research with "big data."

• Founder at National Gun Violence Memorial
  Dec 2015 - Feb 2017 · 1 yr 3 mos

  The National Gun Violence Memorial is a non-profit data journalism project that I created to humanize the problem of U.S. gun violence by publishing photos of every victim. These are real people, not just statistics.