Nikhil Benesch
CTO at turbopuffer | Building serverless search at trillion-scale
About
Nikhil Benesch has spent over a decade working on database systems, with a focus on distributed architectures and streaming data infrastructure. He was an early engineer at Cockroach Labs, where he focused on distributed SQL, and later served as CTO of Materialize, leading development of a streaming database built on incremental computation.
Throughout his career, he has been an active open-source contributor, with projects spanning SQL tooling, systems programming in Rust, and developer utilities. Nikhil is now CTO of turbopuffer, a serverless search engine built on object storage.
The platform is used by products like Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion, and handles AI search workloads at scales exceeding one trillion objects. His work focuses on making high-performance search infrastructure accessible through serverless architectures, eliminating the operational complexity traditionally associated with search systems at scale.
What Nikhil Talks About
Building AI search infrastructure on object storage at trillion-scale
Architectural patterns for serverless database and search systems
Streaming databases and incremental computation approaches
How AI-native companies build startups differently
Open-source systems programming in Rust for data infrastructure
Talks3
Nikhil Benesch at Data Council 2026
Born Different: How AI Natives Build Startups
Fast AI Search on Object Storage @ >1 Trillion Scale
At a Glance
Is this you?
Claim this profile to edit your bio, add talks, and get verified.
Know a talk we're missing?
Get in Touch
Save for Later
Frequently Appeared With
Speakers who have appeared at the same events
Similar Speakers
Related by topic and shared stages
Explore related directories
Conferences, directories, and industries connected to Nikhil Benesch