The People Behind Starflow & Quack On Demand
Three open source engineers who believe data platforms should be declared, not coded. Together they build Starflow, the declarative pipeline platform, and Quack On Demand, the DuckDB serving gateway. Each owns a pillar: the vision, the SQL, and the orchestration.
Hayssam Saleh
Creator of Starflow (formerly Starlake) and Quack On Demand, and founder of Starlake.ai. After two decades architecting large-scale data platforms for European enterprises, Hayssam distilled it into one conviction: pipelines should be declared, not coded. He now leads Quack On Demand into the agentic space, making AI agents first-class clients of the lakehouse rather than credential holders: identity-aware sessions, pinned snapshots, cost budgets, an auditable ledger, and writes that stay reviewable before they reach production.
Andreas Reichel
The engineer behind the Manticore Projects SQL ecosystem and everything SQL inside Starflow. Andreas maintains JSQLParser, the de facto standard Java SQL parser relied on by thousands of production systems, and authored JSQLTranspiler and JSQLFormatter on top of it. His work operates where few engineers go: parsing every major SQL dialect into a full abstract syntax tree, rewriting it, and re-emitting it for another engine. It is the reason a transformation written once in Starflow runs unchanged on DuckDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks, and what lets Quack On Demand serve warehouse-dialect SQL straight from DuckDB.
Stéphane Manciot
Founder of Softnetwork and architect of Starflow's orchestration layer. A veteran of distributed systems and reactive architectures, Stéphane turns declarative pipeline definitions into production-grade scheduled DAGs, inferring dependencies from lineage and generating native Airflow and Dagster workflows. His background in reactive, event-driven architectures is what keeps Starflow orchestration and Quack On Demand's self-healing node pools resilient, observable, and boring in the best possible way.
Build With Us
Whether you want to deploy Starflow or Quack On Demand, contribute to the open source projects, or just talk data engineering, we would love to hear from you.