Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced that Jeff Naughton, one of the most influential database scientists of his generation, has joined the company as Technical Fellow.

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Award-winning database visionary joins Snowflake as Technical Fellow to bridge foundational research and enterprise AI

Award-winning database visionary joins Snowflake as Technical Fellow to bridge foundational research and enterprise AI

The rise of AI agents is placing entirely new demands on enterprise data infrastructure: systems must be faster, more adaptive, and built for workloads that are changing in real time. Naughton will work at the center of that challenge, partnering with Snowflake’s engineering teams to translate decades of systems research into platform capabilities that keep pace with AI’s advance.

“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,” said S. “Murali” Muralidhar, Chief Technology Officer, Snowflake. “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.”

“I’m excited to join Snowflake because the caliber of engineering here is extraordinary,” said Jeff Naughton. “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.”

Naughton will work alongside Snowflake’s Anupam Datta, Principal Research Scientist and AI Research Lead, and Aditya Parameswaran, AI x Data Research Lead, to ensure that advances in AI research translate directly into platform capabilities Snowflake customers can use. He will also deepen Snowflake’s connections to the academic research community and its role in the forums where the field’s most important work is shaped.

“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,” said Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, founding dean of the College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Wisconsin–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.”

Naughton’s work on the Gamma team illustrates the connection between research and working systems. Developed at UW-Madison by David DeWitt, Gamma pioneered techniques for distributing data and executing queries across clusters of commodity computers using a shared-nothing architecture. Gamma received the 2008 ACM Software System Award. Naughton was named an ACM Fellow in 2002.

Most recently, Naughton served as Senior Vice President and Fellow at Celonis. Previously, he spent six years as a Distinguished Scientist at Google, where he worked on Google’s scalable data management systems and also led its Madison engineering office. Before Google, he spent over two decades at UW-Madison, where he held the John P. Morgridge Professorship, following an earlier appointment as an Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

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About Snowflake

Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 14,500 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

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