Snowflake appointed Jeff Naughton as Technical Fellow, adding one of the database industry’s most prominent researchers to help shape the company’s data infrastructure for the AI era.
Naughton will work with Snowflake’s engineering and research teams on the systems challenges created by AI agents, including the need for faster, more adaptive infrastructure capable of supporting workloads that change in real time.
Snowflake said the appointment is intended to strengthen the connection between foundational database research and practical platform capabilities for enterprise customers.
Naughton will work alongside Anupam Datta, Principal Research Scientist and AI Research Lead, and Aditya Parameswaran, AI x Data Research Lead.
His role will include helping translate advances in AI research into product and platform capabilities while also strengthening Snowflake’s ties with the academic research community.
Naughton is an ACM Fellow and co-winner of the ACM Software System Award for Gamma, a landmark parallel database system developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Gamma pioneered techniques for distributing data and executing queries across clusters of commodity computers using a shared-nothing architecture.
The system received the 2008 ACM Software System Award, while Naughton was named an ACM Fellow in 2002.
Most recently, Naughton served as Senior Vice President and Fellow at Celonis.
Before that, he spent six years as a Distinguished Scientist at Google, where he worked on scalable data management systems and led the company’s Madison engineering office.
Earlier in his career, Naughton spent more than two decades at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he held the John P. Morgridge Professorship.
He also previously served as an Assistant Professor at Princeton University.
Snowflake said Naughton’s background across academic research and large-scale production systems will help the company address new infrastructure demands created by AI agents and enterprise AI applications.
The appointment also expands Snowflake’s research bench as the company continues investing in the integration of AI and data systems.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are delighted to welcome Jeff to Snowflake. He helped write the playbook for how data systems scale, and I am thrilled he’s here to help us write the next one for AI. As AI demands fundamentally new things from data infrastructure, we couldn’t ask for a better mind to help connect frontier research with the engineering that ships it. We’re building something extraordinary at Snowflake, and Jeff’s arrival makes that ambition unmistakable.”
S. “Murali” Muralidhar, Chief Technology Officer of Snowflake
“I’m excited to join Snowflake because the caliber of engineering here is extraordinary. The opportunity to strengthen the flow of ideas between academia and industry while helping build the next generation of data infrastructure is exactly why I’m here. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of database research and systems that ship. AI is now rewriting the fundamental assumptions behind both, making this a pivotal moment for the field, and Snowflake is the right place to meet it.”
Jeff Naughton, Technical Fellow at Snowflake
“Few people have shaped the field of database systems the way Jeff has, both through his groundbreaking research and the generations of researchers he mentored at UW–Madison. Jeff’s career reflects the powerful connections between academic research and industry innovation. We’re excited to see him take on this new role at Snowflake and look forward to building on those connections through opportunities for research collaboration.”
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Founding Dean of the College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
