I’m looking for a small number of maintainers for NornicDB

NornicDB is a Neo4j-compatible graph + vector database with MVCC, auditability-oriented features, hybrid retrieval, and a strong bias toward performance and operational simplicity. It’s the kind of system where correctness, latency, storage behavior, and developer ergonomics all matter at the same time.

I’m not looking for “contributors” in the generic open source sense. I’m looking for people whose engineering habits match the shape of this project.

The people I work best with tend to have a few things in common:

• they use agentic tooling well, but don’t use it as a substitute for taste or rigor


• they like spec-driven development, not just coding until tests pass


• they default to TDD or regression-first work when touching complex systems


• they care about performance, memory behavior, query shapes, and hot paths


• they care about developer experience, naming, docs, tooling, and maintainability


• they can hold correctness and pragmatism in their head at the same time


• they are comfortable working on systems that have database, query engine, protocol, and infrastructure concerns all mixed together

This is not a beginner-friendly maintenance surface. It’s a real database codebase, and a lot of the work sits in the uncomfortable middle where product expectations, compatibility, performance, and internal simplicity all pull in different directions.

The kinds of things maintainers might work on:

• Cypher and Bolt compatibility


• MVCC and transactional behavior


• vector and hybrid retrieval execution paths


• storage engine correctness and performance


• audit/history/retention semantics


• benchmarks, profiling, and allocation reduction


• test infrastructure, spec coverage, and regression prevention


• docs and tooling that improve the contributor experience

I care much more about engineering taste than resume pedigree.

If you’re the kind of person who:

• writes tests for bugs before fixing them


• gets annoyed by hidden allocations and avoidable abstractions


• wants docs and tooling to be part of the product, not an afterthought


• uses modern AI tooling to move faster, but still insists on clear specs and defensible code


• likes the idea of maintaining infrastructure that other serious teams can trust

I’d like to talk.

If that sounds like you, reply here or DM me with:

• a few lines on what kinds of systems work you like


• links to anything you’ve built, maintained, or profiled


• what parts of NornicDB you’d most want to touch

I’m intentionally looking for a small number of strong fits, not a large intake.