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March 15, 2022

Big Data Career Notes: March 2022 Edition

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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!


Edward Bush

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. “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.”

Jeremy Freeland

InfluxData, the creator of the time series platform InfluxDB, appointed Jeremy Freeland as the company’s chief legal officer. At InfluxData, Freeland will lead the development of the company’s legal department to support revenue growth, customer success and the expansion of global subsidiaries.

“As the leader in time series data, InfluxData is well-positioned for long-term growth,” said Freeland. “I’m thrilled to join the company at such a pivotal time and look forward to helping its customers build applications of true impact around the world.”

Gerd Heber

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 has been the HDF Group’s Applications Architect since 2010. 

“HDF5 was conceived with pragmatism and change in mind, and that is why I believe it has remained relevant for 20+ years,” Heber said.”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.”

Sudhanshu Jain

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.”

Joey Jablonski

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.” 

Shekhar Iyer 

ArangoDB, the open source graph database, appointed Shekhar Iyer as its chief executive officer. Iyer will also serve on ArangoDB’s board of directors. Most recently, he served as the president of StreamSets, where he was responsible for worldwide customer operations, including sales, marketing, solution engineering, business development partnerships, field enablement, professional services, and customer success. 

“Having spent the past two plus decades of my career in the big data, database and analytics space, I am thrilled to join the ArangoDB team,” said Iyer. “According to Gartner, ‘Graph forms the foundation of modern data and analytics with capabilities to enhance and improve user collaboration, machine learning models and explainable AI.’ ArangoDB is the only graph database that can truly scale to meet this promise.”

Melissa Lyons

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.”

John Mellor, Catherine Wong, Carine Clark, and John Pestana

Domo announced a few leadership promotions and executive additions to its leadership team. First, John Mellor was promoted to chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. Mellor held the role of chief strategy officer at Domo since 2019. In addition, Catherine Wong was promoted to chief operating officer.  Most recently, Wong was the chief product officer and EVP of engineering at Domo since 2013. 

Carine Clark joined Domo’s board of directors as executive chair. Lastly, John Pestana joined the board as a new independent director. Carine has been a director since March 2019 and has served as a member of the audit committee and as chairperson of the compensation committee. Pestana is a distinguished entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of ObservePoint. He was also the co-founder of Omniture, which was acquired by Adobe in 2009.

Brian O’Connor 

Biomedical research nonprofit Sage Bionetworks appointed Brian O’Connor as its chief data officer, where he will be focused on guiding Sage’s data strategy that supports more than 50 cross-institutional scientific research programs. O’Connor comes from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he served as a principal investigator in the data sciences platform. He previously held positions at the University of California at Santa Clara Genomics Institute, including as director of the computational genomics platform.

“I am excited to leverage my experience in data infrastructure to further Sage’s cross-disciplinary work in health research,” said O’Connor. “Collaborative data practices are essential in today’s research, and I look forward to working with an innovative team that is leading the field in applying and developing these practices.” 

Ginger Sanfilippo

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.”

Dominic Sartorio 

Actian, a provider of hybrid cloud data analytics, management, and integration solutions, appointed Dominic Sartorio as its senior vice president of product. Sartorio brings more than 25 years of data and technology experience to Actian, where he will be responsible for the company’s product vision and strategy. In addition, Sartorio will partner with sales, marketing, and engineering to bring Actian’s products to market while providing long-term value to customers and the business. 

“To say I’m excited to join the Actian team is an understatement,” said Sartorio. “I don’t see Actian as just a place to work, but rather I see it as a place to innovate and help make a mark in the rapidly evolving world of data. Actian is already in an excellent position to provide its customers with strategic, intuitive products, and I can’t wait to see what else we can do for the future of data.”

Laura Sellers

Collibra, the data intelligence company, promoted Laura Sellers to the role of chief product officer. Most recently, Sellers served as the senior vice president of product at Collibra. She has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, product management and operational excellence. 

“From the moment I joined Collibra, I have been impressed by both the incredible opportunity in the data intelligence space and the dedication from our team to deliver a best-in-class experience to our customers,” said Sellers. “I’m looking forward to taking on this expanded role as we continue to deliver an innovative product experience that our customers trust.”

Gary Steele

Splunk Inc. appointed Gary Steele as its chief executive officer of the company, and as a member of the company’s board of directors. Steele brings over 30 years of experience scaling SaaS operations and growing multi-billion dollar global enterprises.

“Splunk has built one of the most respected brands in tech and is at the forefront of security and observability. I’m honored to join the company at such an important moment – for both Splunk and the industry,” said Steele. “I’ve dedicated my career to helping companies around the world safeguard their data, systems and infrastructure, and know firsthand how critical Splunk’s products and solutions have become to customers as they navigate hybrid, multi-cloud environments with increasingly complex attacks and threat actors. Splunk is executing against a tremendous opportunity, and I look forward to working with the team to ensure the business reaches its full potential.”

Peter Wurman

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.”

Tim Young

Yellowbrick Data, the leader in distributed data cloud architecture for data warehousing, has appointed Tim Young as its chief marketing officer. Young has more than 25 years of experience marketing technology in AI, machine learning, big data, cloud, and analytics markets. 

Most recently, he built and led global marketing for DataRobot. Before that, he held executive marketing roles at Workday, IBM, and Netezza, where he created the Netezza (now IBM) and TwinFin brands.


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.

Datanami