Lev Kokotov

Lev Kokotov is the founder of PgDog, a database scaling startup, and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to his current venture, he worked at Instacart, where he managed and scaled sharded PostgreSQL infrastructure during the company's significant growth peak in 2020. As a second-time technical founder, Kokotov previously built PostgresML, an open-source platform designed to integrate artificial intelligence directly into PostgreSQL databases. His current company, PgDog, is backed by Y Combinator and develops infrastructure tools such as load balancing and sharding to optimize database performance in production environments. The startup is currently expanding its technical team by hiring founding software engineers and has been featured across multiple episodes of the Postgres FM podcast. His professional background centers on advancing PostgreSQL infrastructure, building database scaling solutions, and integrating artificial intelligence within modern enterprise data systems.