Big Data Career Notes: April 2023 Edition

In this monthly feature, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the big data community. Whether it’s a promotion, new company hire, or even an accolade, we’ve got the details. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!

Saty Bahadur

Appen Limited, provider of high-quality training data for artificial intelligence systems, appointed Saty Bahadur as its chief technology officer. Bahadur brings more than 25 years of experience developing groundbreaking technology, products, and platforms to Appen.

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly transitioning from addressing niche challenges to solving mainstream industry sector and ecosystem problems. Appen stands at the vanguard of AI enablement, offering comprehensive solutions across diverse industries and clients, while crafting the next generation of human experiences powered by ethical AI,” said Bahadur. “During my in-depth due diligence of Appen, I engaged with top business leaders and technologists who validated our shared ambition to harness Appen’s AI platform. I am genuinely thrilled to join Appen on its mission to become the intelligent backbone that fuels the development of generative AI solutions, ultimately benefiting the industry with Appen’s AI For Good strategy of Do Good, Be Good, and Lead Good to enrich the human experience.”

Kit Beall 

Cohesity, a data security and management company, appointed Kit Beall as its chief revenue officer. Beall brings more than 30 years of experience to Cohesity, with deep expertise in software, cloud, security, artificial intelligence and managed services.

“I’m thrilled to join Cohesity at this important juncture of the company’s evolution. I have long regarded Cohesity as having the best technology in the space, and deeply respect their CEO, founder, board, and management team,” said Beall. “Cohesity sits at the junction of three of the highest priority business issues today – security, cloud, and data management, and it provides a radically simple yet highly differentiated approach to securing, protecting, and deriving value from data. I look forward to helping customers and partners succeed, and working with this incredibly talented team.”

Peter Brennan

Scality, a leader in distributed file and object storage, appointed former HPE executive, Peter Brennan, as its chief revenue officer. Prior to HPE, Brennan led a worldwide specialist sales organization for VMware, focused on hyper-converged and hybrid-cloud solutions. He has also held channel and sales leadership positions at LeftHand Networks, Opsware, CommVault, and EMC.

“Scality’s technology has the enterprise-scale capabilities that stand above a crowded object storage market space,” said Brennan. “I’ve seen what goes on behind the scenes, and loyal customers trust Scality for guidance. In addition, our affordable mid-market ARTESCA solution has increased revenue opportunities for partners — bringing enterprise-class features within the reach of more customers. It’s a perfect mix for expansion, and I look forward to extending our partner-first approach to achieve Scality’s growth objectives.”

Carl Eng

Carl Eng joined Google as its product manager to work on the Malloy query language. Eng comes to Google from Eppo, where he held the role of head of data engineering. He’s also held leadership roles at companies including Snowflake, Strava, Euclid, and Teradata.

“I’m thrilled to announce that in April, I will be joining Google as a Product Manager, working with @lloydtabb and co on the Malloy query language,” said Eng in a Twitter post. “I’m convinced that the time is finally right for a new language to supplant SQL for analytical querying. It’s a damn-near impossible task to replace SQL, but after spending some time learning and writing Malloy, I caught a glimpse of just how much better the world of analytics could be. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help realize this vision.If there was ever a team that could achieve the goal of replacing SQL, it’s the folks working on Malloy. They know BI and SQL better than almost anyone else on the planet. Truly humbled to be working alongside them.”

Jason Forget

Cockroach Labs, maker of the enterprise-grade distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, appointed Jason Forget as its president and chief revenue officer. Forget most recently worked at Redis, where he was the first sales hire and led the growth there to over 9,000 paying customers.

“Over the last eight years, Cockroach Labs has created a tremendous team and product, putting them at the helm of changing how organizations manage transactional data,” said Forget. “It’s been inspiring to see how the company has fundamentally disrupted an industry that had remained unchanged for decades, and I look forward to going after the massive opportunity in front of us as a part of this team.”

Christian Guttmann

Pegasystems Inc. appointed Dr. Christian Guttmann as its vice president of engineering, decisioning and AI. Guttmann will oversee the architecture and delivery of AI technology that powers the Pega Infinity product suite.  Guttmann joined  Pega from Tietoevry, a global software and services company where he founded its AI and data business and served as vice president, global head of AI & data.

As a scientist, Dr. Guttmann serves as a senior research fellow (adjunct) of AI and digital health at Karolinska Institutet, one of the world’s top medical schools. He also serves as the executive director at the Nordic AI Institute, a top European independent institute on AI thought leadership.

Natalia Harris

Mezmo, an observability data platform provider, appointed Natalia Harris as its vice president of people and inclusion. Harris will be responsible for overseeing the company’s people development strategies and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

“Creating a positive and diverse workplace culture, building strong teams, and fostering employee development are paramount to success,” Harris said. “Although these have always been important at Mezmo, I plan to work with the executive team to elevate, improve, and expand existing programs to ensure we remain a leader on the way to a brighter world of work.”

Sudhir Hasbe

Neo4j, the graph database and analytics leader, appointed Sudhir Hasbe as its chief product officer. Hasbe will oversee the company’s software portfolio across its native graph database and data science offerings. He previously led product management for Google Cloud’s Data Analytics Platform.

“As the world becomes more connected, so does our data, making the relationships between both data and metadata matter more than ever,” said Hasbe. “Graph enables organizations to find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of data connections. It’s why I’ve come to Neo4j, and why graph will one day be foundational for every modern enterprise.”

Gus Hunt 

Domino Data Lab, provider of the Enterprise MLOps platform, appointed former Central Intelligence Agency Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt as a strategic advisor to Domino’s senior leadership team. Hunt will advise on Domino’s hybrid cloud data science strategy for federal agencies.

“We need powerful data science and analytics to continuously identify the next acute threat facing our country,” said Hunt. “If I can help the national security community do that job in part by making the right introductions and brokering conversations between the government’s technologists and Domino, I’m confident that I’m helping our federal agencies stay current on vital technologies.”

Conor McCarthy

MariaDB plc appointed Conor McCarthy as its chief financial officer. McCarthy brings to the company over 30 years of leading finance organizations at high-growth companies. Most recently, he served as CFO at Ideanomics, a NASDAQ-listed cleantech company.

“In my book, the ingredients for scaling a SaaS business are market opportunity, product differentiation and track record of innovation and execution – MariaDB checks all the boxes,” says McCarthy. “Having scaled multiple SaaS businesses, I see a phenomenal near-term opportunity for MariaDB in the $74 billion relational database market. MariaDB’s second generation cloud database, SkySQL, goes beyond the offerings by public cloud vendors to deliver multicloud freedom, autoscaling both ways, and powerful analytics mixed with transactions. The leadership team and board’s depth of industry expertise combined with the company’s ability to execute, as demonstrated by 90% year-over-year growth in cloud-related subscription revenue, makes me excited for what’s possible with MariaDB.”

Narayan Menon

Matillion, the leader in data productivity, appointed Narayan Menon as its chief financial officer and chief operating officer. Menon brings over 25 years of experience in finance and operations, having held key positions in various companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Cisco, Intuit, Prezi, and Vimeo.

“As someone who uses data and analytics in almost everything I do at work, I am keenly aware of the importance of data – as well as how the lack of business-ready data can hamper an organization,” said Menon. “Matillion is uniquely positioned to help organizations get data business-ready, faster — accelerating time-to-value and increasing the impact data can have on growth and success. I am excited to be part of a fantastic team and to help expand upon Matillion’s success.”

Ernie Ostic and Bernard Desarnauts 

MANTA, the leader in data lineage and metadata management, promoted Ernie Ostic to chief evangelist. Ostic joined MANTA nearly four years ago, bringing with him over 40 years of industry experience in data integration, including 14 years at IBM.

In addition, MANTA appointed Bernard Desarnauts as its senior vice president of product. Desarnauts brings a strong track record of product leadership, including previous roles as SVP of product at PandaDoc and Rinse.

Jonathan Sander

ALTR appointed Jonathan Sander to its board of directors. Sander has more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He currently serves as the security field chief technology officer at Snowflake.

“Throughout my relationship with ALTR, I witnessed first-hand their commitment to solving cloud data governance and security challenges while always staying mindful of their customer’s need for performance and simplicity. ALTR’s ability to enforce controls in near real-time is astonishing, and the fact that it can offer solutions for every part of the security and governance stack, from managing built-in Snowflake policies to doing data tokenization, means they’re positioned to help so many in the growing data universe,” said Sander. “I’m thrilled to be part of the company’s continued innovation and to help set the future course for the industry.”

Haiyan Song

NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, appointed Haiyan Song as its executive vice president and general manager of its cloud operations business unit. Song most recently served as EVP and GM of security and distributed cloud at F5.

“I am excited to join NetApp and lead the company’s efforts to be a strategic and operational partner to customers on their journey to the cloud and in the cloud,” said Song. “Cloud is a key enabler for the new digital world powered by data and AI, but organizations of all sizes are still grappling with the complexities of developing and operating in multi-cloud environments. I look forward to working with the talented team at NetApp to deliver innovative solutions to help customers better manage this complexity and unlock the full potential of the cloud.”

Asaf Yigal 

Logz.io appointed its co-founder Asaf Yigal to the role of chief technology officer. Yigal has served as vice president of product at Logz.io since the company’s founding in 2015. Prior to that, he co-founded and served as vice president of product at Currensee.

“First, I’m eager to develop partnerships with providers who are adjacent to us in the market ecosystem to build out innovative, holistic solutions that offer value to our mutual customers,” he said. “Secondly, this CTO position is unique in that it bridges the gap between product development and marketing, giving me the rare opportunity to tell the story but also stay well connected to our engineering team. And thirdly, we’re a company that is committed to open source, which is a passion of mine, and I look forward to driving more active participation in the open source community.”

Ulf Zetterberg 

Sinequa appointed Ulf Zetterberg as its co-chief executive officer. In the new role, Zetterberg will focus on worldwide business operations.Zetterberg served on Sinequa’s board of directors from March 2021 to January 2023, where he provided strategic planning and oversight during the company’s European expansion.

“Having spent the last two years with the Sinequa team serving on the board, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities ahead,” Zetterberg said. ‘Sinequa is on the forefront of the most advanced AI-enabled search capabilities for enterprise use. I look forward to working more closely with Sinequa’s customers, partners and employees around the world.”

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.