• CEO and Co-Founder

  Umur Cubukcu

  Umur developed new business with world's leading retailers and consumer goods companies (among them Wal-Mart, Kimberly-Clark, and L'Oreal) and sold enterprise software while at TrueDemand, a demand analytics start-up in California.

  Before that, Umur worked on numerous projects around the globe with the Boston Consulting Group. Most recently, Umur was the CEO of Mekanist.net, where he helped put the company on a growth path.

  Umur holds an M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University.

• CTO and Co-Founder

  Ozgun Erdogan

  Ozgun worked as a software developer for four years in the Distributed Systems Engineering team at Amazon. There, he proposed, designed, and implemented novel algorithms on distributed caching and consistency; and also worked on building systems for scalable data analytics.

  Ozgun earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his B.S. from Galatasaray University. He also holds patents on distributed cache consistency and load balancing.

• VP of Engineering and Co-Founder

  Sumedh Pathak

  Sumedh worked as a software development engineer for over five years at Amazon.com. While there, he optimized the fulfillment workflow software for Amazon’s supply chain, and extended the shopping cart application.

  Sumedh has extensive experience both on distributed data stores such as Dynamo, as well as relational stores such as Oracle; he regularly worked on these systems during his days in the ordering and shopping cart teams.

  Sumedh earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his B.S. from the University of Minnesota.

• Head of Cloud

  Craig Kerstiens

  Craig has built product and teams at a number of companies, from small startups to large enterprises. His primary expertise is in building developer and data-focused products.

  Prior to joining Citus, Craig ran Product for a number of Heroku teams, spending the majority of his time building and growing Heroku Postgres.

  Craig earned his degree in Management Information Systems from The University of Alabama.

• VP of Product Marketing

  Claire Giordano

  Claire has served in leadership roles in product marketing, product management, and engineering at Sun Microsystems, Quantum, and A9.com, an Amazon company.

  Claire managed the system software team at Sun that created resource management features, including zones. Claire also directed the effort to open source Solaris and spearheaded the marketing launch. At A9, Claire launched a new beta advertising platform. And at Quantum, Claire delivered over 15 new scale-out storage products before leading solutions marketing for technical use cases.

  Claire earned her Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

• Managing Director, EMEA

  Utku Azman

  Prior to joining Citus, Utku served in senior business development and strategy roles at Intel and Oracle in EMEA, building regional collaborations, leading strategy development and assisting software sales.

  Previously, Utku worked as a consultant at McKinsey's Business Technology Office in London, working on various strategy projects in enterprises across Europe. Earlier in his career, Utku worked as a Product Manager at Google and as a Systems Engineer at Alcatel-Lucent.

  Utku holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from London Business School.

• Steffany Boldrini

  Steffany is Director of Sales at Citus Data. Throughout her career in tech, Steffany has been a firm believer in finding the best solution for customers—and she always puts customers first.

  Prior to Citus, Steffany was in sales at Sauce Labs and at MongoDB. During Steffany’s tenure at Mongo, the company grew from 100 to 500 employees, and Steffany received numerous awards, including for best new territory.

  Steffany earned a Bachelor of Applied Science in Business Management from SJSU. Originally from Brazil, Steffany came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2000 and never left!

• Metin Doslu

  Metin worked as a software developer on different projects including a train traffic control center and a cloud platform for mobile devices. Metin also participated in the ESPN Winning Formula Challenge powered by TopCoder, and took 2nd place with his predictive algorithm for College Football game scores.

  Metin holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Bogazici University.

• Samay Sharma

  Samay is a software developer at Citus Data. He crossed paths with Citus after taking an Interview Street Code Sprint, and placing among the top %0.5 of all candidates. That initially led to his internship at Citus, where he worked on the MongoDB foreign data wrapper.

  He also worked on various other projects during his time in school, including an intrusion detection system, a Wikipedia Search Engine, and a review summary engine. Samay holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIIT-Hyderabad, India.

• Jason Petersen

  At Amazon, Jason drove the design, implementation, and operation of a new distributed real-time cloud monitoring service, CloudWatch. From there he made a drastic change to crafting cutting-edge web interfaces at the small startup TrackSimple, which was quickly acquired by a slightly larger startup, BlueKai.

  After three years in the UI world, Jason decided to return to his roots in distributed systems, arriving at Citus Data in December 2013. Jason holds a BS in CS from the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Denver with his wife, baby boy, and neurotic—but clever—dog.

• Marco Slot

  Marco joins us from Harlem, the Netherlands. Marco has an M.S. in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems from VU University Amsterdam and completed a PhD on cooperative self-driving cars at Trinity College Dublin.

  While studying, he also worked as a software engineer on Amazon CloudFront and Route 53 for several years, driving the design of latency-driving request routing and several other key features.

• Önder Kalaci

  Önder worked on different projects including environmental monitoring systems and unified threat management (UTM).

  He holds B.S. degree from METU and M.S. degree from Boğaziçi University in computer engineering. His main interest is thread level parallelism.

• Murat Tuncer

  Murat was involved in R&D projects in distributed systems, network protocol analysis, and data mining prior to joining Citus Data. He brings experience from the defense industry in addition to Microsoft and Real Networks.

  Murat holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University.

• Andres Freund

  Andres is a PostgreSQL committer and developer, focusing on replication, scalability and robustness. Before Citus Data he worked as a PostgreSQL Developer and Consultant at 2ndQuadrant and as a freelancing consultant in the areas of databases and software engineering.

  He has been developing Postgres and other Open Source projects since 2005. In his free time he enjoys climbing, diving and reading paper books.

• Eren Başak

  Eren worked as a software engineer at a defense company before joining Citus Data. He developed web and mobile applications, worked on geographical information systems and involved in software quality measurement.

  He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University where he also pursues his M.S. degree on Crowd Simulation Systems.

• Brian Cloutier

  Brian has programmed gold mines, robots, cell phones, and everything in between. He's reversed network protocols, written systems to securely process credit cards, and once downloaded every free android app.

  If you've read the other bios on this page you're going to have a hard time believing this, but Brian loves thinking about distributed systems and feels right at home at Citus.

• Daniel Farina

  Daniel expended the last five years at Heroku Postgres and wrote, contributed to, and maintained many features there, including disaster recovery, replication, high availability, log transport, and perimeter security while employed there.

  Many of these features rely on an open source project he started there, WAL-E, which is a popular recovery and replication package for Postgres on multiple cloud providers. Before that, he worked on the optimizer and executor at Truviso, which delivered a streaming database system built from a fork of Postgres.

• Will Leinweber

  Will Leinweber has a M.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but after college he founded a company in an unrelated field.

  Prior to joining Citus he spent five years as a major member of the Heroku Postgres team and as a conference speaker.

• Hanna Wischmann

  Hanna is in charge of events marketing at Citus Data—as well as being responsible for operations for our San Francisco site. Before Citus, Hanna served as facilities manager for Amazon Web Services in San Francisco.

  Hanna has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Utah in mass communication, with an emphasis on visual journalism.

• Joe Nelson

  Joe is a speaker, blogger and maintainer of popular open source projects, notably PostgREST a RESTful API server for PostgreSQL. In addition to programming he enjoys teaching and organizing events such as the Bay Area Haskell Users Group.

  Joe holds a BS in Mathematics from UW Madison and continues to study math recreationally with friends.

• Sai Krishna Srirampur

  Sai is a Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Citus. Sai has a Bachelors in CS and a Masters in Computational Linguistics from IIIT Hyderabad, India. He has three research publications in the field of Natural Language Processing. Prior to Citus, Sai worked as a Software Developer at Epic Systems Corp for 1.5 years.

  During his time at Epic, he was a core team member of the medical records Interoperability team. In his free time, he plays professional ping-pong. Sai is a multifaceted Engineer at Citus.

• Lukas Fittl

  Lukas is focusing on making distributed databases easier to use, and is a member of the Citus Cloud team.

  Initially from Austria, he's previously been part of the Founding Team at Product Hunt, as well as Co-Founder at Soup.io and Spark59.

• Sally Martinez

  Sally joined Citus as part of the sales team. She previously worked for Percona as an Account Manager working to build, develop, maintain, and grew accounts along with developing ongoing lead pipeline.

  Before her time at Percona, she spent 4 years with the original MySQL AB team as a Lead Development Representative focused on demand to close process.

  Her other experiences include some years spent as a Senior Lead Development Representative with an open-source Business Intelligence organization. She is committed to putting our customers first and understanding customers needs.

• Burak Yucesoy

  Prior to joining Citus Data, Burak worked as a software engineer at SAP on distributed database systems and did a research internship at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He also contributed translation of Ubuntu into Turkish language.

  Apart from distibuted databases, his main interests are robotics, machine learning and greek mythology. He also loves to play experimental games in his free time.

  Burak holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University.

• Burak Velioglu

  Prior to joining Citus Burak worked as a software developer on different projects including mobile GIS framework and virtual driving simulator. He also worked as a machine learning researcher on the brain decoding area.

  Burak holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from METU in computer engineering.

• Hadi Moshayedi

  Hadi developed cstore_fdw and a bevy of useful Citus features when he joined Citus as the first employee in 2012. Hadi is an ex-Googler and an active Chromium contributor, contributing select patches to event dispatching and processing in ChromeOS.

  Hadi has won many programming competitions over the years. Nowadays he dreams of distributed databases and winning road bike races.

Advisors

• Josh Berkus

  Josh Berkus is a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team, and is CEO of the consulting company PostgreSQL Experts Inc., where he often helps customers develop data warehousing solutions.

  Prior to PostgreSQL Experts, Josh was in charge of PostgreSQL for Solaris at Sun Microsystems, and he helped launch data warehousing startup GreenPlum.

  He has previously been on the advisory boards for business intelligence company Actuate, PostgreSQL vendor EnterpriseDB, and NoSQL vendor CouchDB.

• Peter Van Hardenberg

  Peter van Hardenberg was an early team member at Heroku and co-founded Heroku's Department of Data, the team behind Heroku Postgres. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com in December 2010 for $212M less than four years after founding.

  Earlier in his career, Peter worked as an Arctic oceanographer, game developer, and Shakespearean scholar. Peter lives in the heart of San Francisco and advises high-growth software companies like Citus Data, Zapproved, and Auth0.