Hydro Team

The Hydro framework began as a research project at UC Berkeley led by Joe Hellerstein, continuing a long line of work applying insights from database research to distributed systems. In 2025, several graduates of the Hydro group joined AWS to continue its development in a production environment. The core team, which leads the technical direction for Hydro, consists of researchers and engineers at UC Berkeley and AWS. We also collaborate with leading researchers at UC Berkeley and Princeton University.

Hydro's open-source community and associated channels (such as Discord) are governed by the Core Team, consisting of: Joe Hellerstein, David Chu, Lucky Katahanas, Shadaj Laddad, Conor Power, and Mingwei Samuel. New Core Team and Committer members are approved via a public GitHub review process. All governance decisions (including membership, policy changes, and any other actions requiring Core Team privileges) require approval from a majority of Core Team members (affirmative votes > negative + absences). Committers have write access to the core Hydro repositories, but only Core Team members can cast votes for governance decisions.