Redpanda Appoints Former Snowflake and Google Distinguished Engineer Tyler Akidau as Chief Technology Officer

May 14, 2025 at 09:00 AM EDT

Akidau will play a pivotal role in expanding Redpanda’s streaming and agentic AI service for the enterprise

Redpanda, the real-time data platform for the agentic enterprise, today announced the appointment of Tyler Akidau as chief technology officer (CTO). Tyler brings more than 20 years of experience as a data streaming architect, serving for several years as distinguished software engineer at Snowflake, following a dozen years at Google. He will report to CEO Alex Gallego and oversee all aspects of product development.

“Redpanda is adding more intellectual horsepower to an already all-star executive team. Tyler’s one of the most respected foundational builders and brightest minds in data streaming,” said Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Redpanda. “His proven leadership in architecting the most complex data systems at Google and Snowflake and significant influence in the data streaming ecosystem are undeniable – his work even served as a key reference point when I was building Redpanda. Tyler is ideally positioned to help shape our product platform and execute on our agentic AI roadmap. I'm thrilled to welcome someone so deeply aligned with Redpanda’s mission to build breakthrough products for developers.”

Akidau spent 12 years at Google focused on stream processing including serving as the technology lead for the MillWheel team, which is often viewed as one of the foundational streaming systems. While there, he authored many of the foundational texts for stream processing including the Streaming 101 and Streaming 102 blog posts and the Streaming Systems book for O’Reilly. Prior to joining Redpanda, Akidau was a distinguished software engineer for Snowflake for five years, where he focused on stream processing and the development of Dynamic Tables.

“I strongly believe Redpanda represents the future of data streaming and by extension agentic AI,” said Akidau. “Having spent the majority of my career focused on stream processing, I deeply appreciate the innovative platform that Alex and his team have built – which powers the most sophisticated streaming applications in the world. I am honored to join Redpanda during such a pivotal time and look forward to accelerating more data technology transformation.”

About Redpanda

Redpanda is a real-time data platform that powers agentic and operational applications by integrating real-time event processing, historical analytics, and AI connectivity into a unified system. Unlike traditional architectures that require sending data to external AI models, Redpanda and its innovative BYOC capabilities brings the model to the data. Global leaders including Activision Blizzard, Cisco, Moody's, Texas Instruments, Vodafone and 2 of the top 5 banks in the U.S. rely on Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data a day. Backed by premier venture investors Lightspeed, GV and Haystack VC, Redpanda is a diverse, people-first organization with teams distributed around the globe. To learn more, visit our website at redpanda.com and follow us on X at @redpandadata.