Leonhard Spiegelberg

Leonhard Spiegelberg is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, where he works on exabyte-scale data and agentic infrastructure for production-critical workloads. His work focuses on the systems that power OpenAI's most critical production environments, operating at unprecedented scale.

Before joining OpenAI, Leonhard worked at Snowflake, where he originated and shipped pandas on Snowflake, bringing native DataFrame computing to the data warehouse. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, where he researched speculative compilation techniques for efficient data processing as a Facebook Fellow.

His research has been published at leading venues including VLDB, SIGMOD, and OSDI, and he holds multiple patents in the field. His recent talks challenge conventional wisdom in the data engineering community, questioning whether the proliferation of DataFrame APIs has truly served the industry's needs and advocating for new approaches to data tooling.