AI Career Notes: March 2022 Edition
In this monthly feature we bring you up to date on the latest career developments in the enterprise AI community – promotions, new hires and accolades:
Peter Buckingham
SambaNova Systems, an AI systems company, has named Peter Buckingham to vice president of software engineering. Buckingham is responsible for enabling the software team to capture the rapidly increasing transformational opportunity of AI in the public sector and the enterprise.
“With AI, we are experiencing one of the biggest transitions in computing history since the internet and the transition is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible now. Enterprises are rapidly deploying AI to accelerate their transformation and jump into the future of computing,” said Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova Systems. “I’m excited to welcome Peter to the team. His experience will enable SambaNova to quickly create software to help enterprise leaders unleash AI’s power.”
Dataiku, the platform for everyday AI, promoted Edward Bush to the role of chief operating officer with a focus on enabling the company’s operational growth by leading global people, expansion, and program management. Bush joined in 2017 as Dataiku’s vice president of finance and has helped Dataiku raise over half a billion dollars and grow the company from less than 50 employees to almost 1,000 today.
“Dataiku is such a special company because of the people we’re lucky to work alongside every day. We have 1,000 colleagues in over 20 countries dedicated to building, selling, and supporting the world’s pioneering Everyday AI platform,” said Bush, COO. “Maintaining and expanding our strong operational culture as we scale requires a commitment to be intentional and inclusive in everything we do. I am excited and humbled to be in a position to help facilitate Dataiku’s next phase of growth.”
Automox, the cloud-native IT operations platform provider, appointed Corey Bodzin as its senior vice president of product. Bodzin will be responsible for guiding the Automox product vision while leading the company’s pct and design teams. He brings more than 25 years of experience in spearheading thoughtful, results-driven product initiatives in cybersecurity, risk management, and regulatory compliance.
"More than 25 years ago, I started my career managing Windows and Unix desktops and remember how my days, nights, and weekends were filled with tedious tasks across a handful of tools trying to keep those systems up-to-date. Unfortunately, that's still the reality for too many IT teams today,” said Bodzin. “Automox is revolutionizing IT operations with a cloud-native solution that makes it easy to keep every endpoint updated and secure, wherever in the world they are, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”
John Caldwell, Lisa Su, Jon Olson, and Elizabeth Vanderslice
AMD’s board of directors elected its president and chief executive officer, Dr. Lisa Su, as chair of the board and John E. Caldwell as lead independent director. Outgoing chair Caldwell joined AMD’s board of directors in 2006 and became chair in 2016. In addition, former Xilinx board members Jon Olson and Elizabeth Vanderslice joined the AMD board.
Olson joined the Xilinx board in May 2020 after previously serving as Xilinx’s chief financial officer. He currently serves on the boards of Kulicke & Soffa, a supplier of semiconductor and electronic assembly solutions, and Rocket Lab USA, Inc., a provider of launch and space systems.
Vanderslice joined the Xilinx board in December 2000. She has served as a partner at Trewstar Corporate Board Services since 2019 and was previously general manager of Lycos, Inc. through its acquisition. She also serves as a Trustee of Boston College.
SymphonyAI, a leader in high-value enterprise AI software solutions for strategic industries, announced Sanjay Dhawan has joined as chief executive officer. Dhawan will drive SymphonyAI’s growth as an integrated company pursuing a single strategy across retail, CPG, financial services, manufacturing, media, IT service management, and additional sectors.
“I am delighted and honored to lead SymphonyAI as its CEO. SymphonyAI’s scale, growth, customer base, and expertise combined with the EurekaAI platform is set to deliver sustained value,” said Dhawan. “Having had the experience of working with Romesh to build world-class, results-oriented teams and companies, I am pleased to have the opportunity to join him again. SymphonyAI’s relentless focus on delivering rapid, measurable value to customers is our recipe for success. SymphonyAI’s ability to catalyze the next generation of problem-solving for business, fueled by enterprise AI, will lead to exciting outcomes for both customers and investors.”
Steve Furber, a Tachyum’s corporate advisory board member, was named one of the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering award winners “for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer chips” by the National Academy of Engineering.
“It is quite an honor to be recognized for my work in advancing RISC technology in general, and the ARM processor specifically, by the NAE in bestowing on me the prestigious Draper Prize for Engineering,” said Furber. “I believe that many of the advances we were able to make in forwarding this work are being carried on at innovative companies such as Tachyum, which is leveraging low-power, high-performance chips to enable human brain-scale AI to revolutionize the world.”
DartPoints, the edge digital infrastructure provider, appointed Jeff Greenberg as its vice president and chief marketing officer. Greenberg has more than 25 years of telecom and technology marketing experience, helping organizations develop go-to-market programs and improve positioning to enable revenue generation through both direct and partner channels.
“DartPoints has a strong reputation as a leader in the industry and a clear vision of where the edge is going,” said Greenberg. “I look forward to working with DartPoints’ incredible team as we continue to drive awareness and demand around our solutions.”
Arm appointed Rene Haas as its chief executive officer and member of the board of directors. Haas has served as president of the Arm IP Products Group since 2017. Under his leadership, IPG increased investment in the industry’s largest software developer ecosystem as well as products for growth markets such as infrastructure and automotive.
“It is an honor to lead the world’s most influential technology company at a time when Arm’s market opportunity has never been greater,” said Haas. “As the innovators of the industry’s most pervasive compute architecture, Arm changed lives around the globe by delivering the technology at the heart of the smartphone revolution. We are now uniquely positioned to address the diverse demands of AI, cloud, IoT, automotive and the Metaverse. And with the uncertainty of the past several months behind us, we are emboldened by a renewed energy to move into a growth strategy and change lives around the world―again.”
Rigetti Holdings, Inc., a hybrid quantum-classical computing systems solutions provider, appointed Michael Harburn as its chief technical officer. Harburn previously held the role of senior vice president of fabrication operations and QPU engineering at Rigetti. Before joining Rigetti in 2018, Harburn served as VP of global operations at Kateeva.
“I’m excited to continue being a part of the team as CTO. Our progress towards building scalable quantum computers has been a full team accomplishment, and I look forward to continuing to lead these great teams of engineers and physicists as we work towards quantum advantage,” said Harburn.
The HDF Group announced its board of directors has appointed Gerd Heber as its new executive director. The HDF Group is a software company dedicated to creating and supporting technologies to address many of today’s big data challenges. Heber, who has been The HDF Group’s Applications Architect since 2010, replaces Mike Folk upon his retirement. Folk will remain a member of the board of directors.
Heber said, “HDF5 was conceived with pragmatism and change in mind, and that is why I believe it has remained relevant for 20+ years. It is inspiring to see that in the last six months, HDF5 software was downloaded over 150,000 times from over 9,200 locations in 191 countries. However, the pace of change has picked up, the drivers of change are more manifold, and the economic model surrounding software technology is quite different today. There are interesting technical problems to be addressed, but that is the ‘easy part.’ The challenges to our organization and the HDF5 ecosystem at large are far more complex and will be my focus. Whatever the changes to come may be, I want our users and clients to know that our mission and values remain unchanged, in particular, our unwavering commitment to free open-source software.”
Applied Materials, Inc. has named Brice Hill as the company's senior vice president and chief financial officer. Hill has 25 years of finance leadership experience within the semiconductor industry, most recently as CFO of Xilinx, Inc. through the period of acquisition by AMD, and previously at Intel Corporation where he was the finance leader of many of the company’s largest businesses and functions. At Applied Materials, Hill succeeds interim CFO Bob Halliday who will remain with Applied Materials to support the transition and resume his role as a corporate vice president and advisor.
Pliops, a provider of data processors for cloud and enterprise data centers, appointed Sudhanshu Jain as its vice president of product management and strategic alliances. Jain will be responsible for leading the product strategy and roadmap. He comes to Pliops from VMware, where he led product management for the company’s software-defined data center solutions and converged infrastructure.
“We live in a time of an unprecedented surge in data, and organizations increasingly rely on computing and storage innovation to put that data to use,” Jain said. “The Pliops XDP and its data virtualization engine change the status quo and bring order of magnitude benefits to customers. I am looking forward to working with our incredibly talented team to execute our strategic product roadmap and further drive Pliops innovation and reach.”
Pythian Services Inc., a data, analytics and cloud services company, appointed Joey Jablonski as its vice president of analytics. Jablonski brings 20 years of experience in infrastructure, operations, solutions architecture, and data analytics, governance and engineering. He has held executive leadership positions at companies including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Sun Microsystems.
“Pythian’s focus on helping customers realize the full value of their data estate is perfectly aligned with my experience and I am thrilled to join this team,” said Jablonski. “Leveraging the power of data is a multi-faceted journey for any organization and Pythian has the expertise to guide its customers through every stage.”
Scality, the file and object storage solutions provider, appointed Melissa Lyons as its senior director of channels for Americas. Lyons joins Scality to support the rapidly expanding U.S. channel and alliance partners business, which has grown 42 percent year over year.
"Scality has storage solutions organizations need now to scale and secure their data, and their robust partner growth underscores their value to the market,” Lyons said. “Scality's commitment to growing the channel, coupled with the company's unique culture, drew me to this position. I look forward to being part of the Scality team and furthering momentum for the channel program."
Altair appointed Jeff Marraccini as its chief information security officer. Marraccini will be responsible for the strategy and the implementation of Altair’s global security programs across all functions, including Altair’s DevOps center of excellence, IT, legal, and services.
Prior to this role, Marraccini served as Altair’s senior vice president of cloud strategy and technology, where he focused on technical compliance, security controls, tools, cloud specialties, and security vendor operations. In his 25 years at Altair, he has also held other leadership roles focused on IT, computer systems, network systems, and technology security.
Tenstorrent, a hardware start-up developing next-generation computers, appointed Matthew Mattina as its vice president of machine learning. Mattina will be responsible for leading Tenstorrent’s efforts to enable industry-leading performance and scalability of modern neural networks and Software 2.0.
Before Mattina joined Tenstorrent, he was distinguished engineer and senior director of Arm’s Machine Learning Research Lab, where he led a team of researchers and engineers developing advanced hardware, software, and algorithms for high performance deep learning inference for the Arm ecosystem.
MemVerge announced Sean Milner as its vice president of sales. Milner brings to MemVerge more than 20 years of experience in selling SaaS, cloud, enterprise software, and IT infrastructure solutions. Most recently, he served as senior VP of sales for Avochato, where he led the company’s sales, business development and customer success teams.
“We are at the dawn of a new era of application proliferation and the only thing holding tomorrow’s applications back is memory,” said Milner. “MemVerge is taking the constraints modern applications have with today’s compute and storage technologies head on. I am thrilled to be a part of this new memory revolution and I’m eager to help the MemVerge leadership team capitalize on growing demand for Big Memory Computing in a multi-cloud world.”
Rigetti Holdings, Inc. elected retired Marine General Peter Pace as its chairman of the board. Pace, who has served on Rigetti’s board of directors since June 2017, brings leadership experience gained through his decades-long military career and previous experience serving on the board of directors of several private and public companies.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed serving on the Rigetti Computing board of directors, and I’m honored to be appointed chairman. Quantum computing’s broad impact, from national security to finance and beyond, is moving from theory to real-world applications, and Rigetti is at the helm of moving the industry forward. I am delighted to help lead as Rigetti begins the next chapter,” said Pace.
WEKA appointed Nilesh Patel as its first chief product officer. Patel will be responsible for developing WEKA’s mid-to-long term product and solutions roadmap and driving associated technology alliances and services delivery as the company enters hypergrowth. Patel has served in product management and marketing leadership roles with Intel, NetApp, and Palo Alto Networks, among others. He joins WEKA from Digital14, where he was executive vice president of the company’s Secure Solutions business unit.
“Enterprise AI and hybrid cloud are the next frontier of innovation and business transformation – WEKA is making it possible for anyone to harness it,” Patel said. “In my experience, the siloed data infrastructures of the past cannot address the future needs of AI/ML powered enterprise workloads. It’s an exciting time to be joining WEKA’s talented team and I look forward to helping to shape future generations of the WEKA Data Platform for AI.”
Philip Roth, a group leader in the National Center for Computational Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was named the general chair of SC24, the 2024 edition of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. As general chair, Roth will set the overall vision for SC24 and work with the sponsoring societies, the conference’s volunteer committee members, and the conference’s contractors to plan and carry out the event.
“I think getting people together so they can form new connections or strengthen existing connections really pays off going forward,” Roth said. “If I can help make that environment possible, whether it’s by providing interesting
TigerGraph appointed Ginger Sanfilippo, a former Neo4j vice president, as its senior enterprise sales director. Sanfilippo will lead efforts to support the brand’s ongoing market dominance and further develop the company’s position as the definitive graph analytics platform for artificial intelligence.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to join TigerGraph and I am grateful to be a part of this powerhouse sales team,” Sanfilippo said. “TigerGraph is disrupting everything we thought we knew about graph analytics and I look forward to lending my passion and experience to this next chapter of the company’s journey.”
SymphonyAI, a provider of enterprise AI software solutions for strategic industries, appointed Jennifer Trzepacz as its chief people officer. Trzepacz will be responsible for leading the global HR strategy and building the SymphonyAI culture, critical components of SymphonyAI’s evolution as an integrated enterprise AI company delivering solutions to multiple sectors, including retail, CPG, financial services, manufacturing, media, federal, and IT operations.
“SymphonyAI’s approach to enterprise AI software makes it a tech company unlike any other in the space. Offering industry-specific solutions that deliver rapid results is how we win – and the teams that support the development of those results are central to continued growth and innovation,” said Trzepacz. “SymphonyAI’s vertical businesses have a remarkable ability to replicate success across industries. As we continue to scale, I look forward to uncovering and developing company-wide practices that support those teams in their ongoing achievements.”
Malbek, providers of the AI-fueled contract lifecycle management platform, appointed Ben Willis as its vice president of products. Willis brings to Malbek over 25 years of experience in product development and strategy at several prominent companies.
“I am honored to join the Malbek team as VP of Products," said Willis. “Malbek has built an impressive team and an extraordinary reputation in the market based on its reimagined CLM solution. We plan to continue to innovate with the platform while keeping the user at the center of all our design work to support and drive Malbek’s exceptional growth trajectory.
Peter Wurman, director at Sony AI America, was named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Wurman was recognized by AAAI for his “significant contributions to computational auction theory and multi-agent systems, and for important applications of robotics.”
“I am honored to be recognized by the AAAI Fellows selection committee, and humbled to be among this distinguished group of Fellows,” said Wurman. “Throughout my career, I've chased challenges at the intersection of AI and real-world applications. It’s an honor to be recognized for the work I am doing in this field, and I hope it can inspire future researchers to pursue work in this field.”
To read last month's edition of Career Notes, click here.
Do you know someone that should be included in next month's list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.