Meet the Team Behind Snowflake Postgres

In June 2025, Snowflake acquired Crunchy Data to help bring Postgres, the world’s most popular open source transactional database, to its users. The Crunchy Data team has spent years engineering Postgres for enterprise workloads, and its team of community contributors has shaped how organizations of all sizes deploy and manage Postgres at scale. 

Today, we’re excited to introduce you to Crunchy Data, and the team behind Snowflake Postgres. We’ll take a look at what they’ve accomplished so far, and how their collective experience will shape the next evolution of the Snowflake data platform.

Developer-friendly Postgres, ready for enterprise 

The Crunchy story began in 2012. Founders Bob and Paul Laurence recognized a growing demand for open source databases at large organizations with robust security standards. They set out to productionalize Postgres through a curated, security-first distribution of Postgres, Crunchy Certified PostgreSQL. Crunchy Certified PostgreSQL is secure by design, tuned for performance, and comes with advanced functionality thanks to a suite of open source extensions. It was during this time that the Crunchy team helped Postgres achieve Common Criteria certification and authored the official Postgres STIG, the definitive security hardening guide for Postgres.

In 2017, Crunchy Data launched a pioneering Postgres Operator for Kubernetes. The operator provides automated provisioning, lifecycle management and zero-downtime rolling updates, and it is one of the most popular Kubernetes operators available for Postgres today. 

While Crunchy Data’s original focus was on self-managed Postgres, the emergence of cloud computing and databases-as-a-service led the team to launch Crunchy Bridge in 2020, a fully managed cloud Postgres service. Crunchy Bridge is designed for production readiness and developer experience. It simplifies the deployment and management of Postgres databases, handling tasks like backups and high availability, allowing developers and organizations to focus on their applications rather than database administration. It also includes robust security features, like encryption at rest/transit, isolated networks, VPC peering, Private Link and more. 

In the years since launching Crunchy Bridge, Crunchy Data has continued to make investments in Postgres and the broader community. 

Contributions to the Postgres ecosystem

The Crunchy Data team has helped shape the Postgres ecosystem in more ways than one.  Regular Postgres committer Tom Lane first joined Crunchy Data 2015. Other team members have also made contributions to Postgres, like the psql \watch command from Will Leinweber, \timing from Greg Sabino Mullane, and \conninfo from David Christensen.

Beyond core Postgres, the Crunchy team has made significant contributions to the Postgres extension ecosystem. Team member Paul Ramsey chairs the PostGIS Project Steering Committee to help advance Postgres’ impressive geospatial capabilities, while Keith Fiske’s contributions to pg_partman are now a key part of how developers automate table partitioning strategies in Postgres. Marco Slot and Önder Kalaci were key individuals driving projects like pg_cron and Citus, which brought sharding capabilities to Postgres. Crunchy’s former Chief Product Officer, Craig Kerstiens, helped build one of the earliest managed Postgres services (Heroku Postgres), and is currently leading the engineering effort behind Snowflake Postgres.

The Crunchy team also supports the Postgres community through organizational leadership; Elizabeth Garrett Christensen serves on the Board of the United States PostgreSQL Association, while Karen Jex serves on the Board for PostgreSQL Europe.

Whether it’s contributing to database internals or advancing community efforts, the Crunchy team has a track record of making Postgres more secure, more powerful and more developer-friendly. And now, they’re bringing that expertise to Snowflake Postgres.

A data platform for every workload

Snowflake Postgres brings together two complementary visions for the future of data. While Snowflake revolutionized data analytics with its cloud-native data warehouse, Crunchy Data has spent more than a decade perfecting open source enterprise Postgres. Together, we’re building a unified data layer that seamlessly bridges transactional and analytical workloads, without the complexity of managing fragmented systems. Organizations will be able to run their mission-critical applications at any scale on Postgres, while leveraging that same data for analytics, machine learning and AI — all within Snowflake's secure, governed environment. 

We can’t wait for you to start building on Snowflake Postgres. For more information on Snowflake Postgres, check out the acquisition announcement, and make sure to register for the virtual BUILD 2025 conference in November.