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

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

May 14, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Redpanda, the real-time data platform for the agentic enterprise, today announced the appointment of Tyler Akidau as chief technology officer (CTO). Akidau brings more than 20 years of experience as a data streaming architect, having served as a distinguished software engineer at Snowflake and spending over a decade at Google, where he was instrumental in building foundational stream processing systems. Reporting to CEO Alex Gallego, Akidau will oversee all aspects of product development and play a pivotal role in expanding Redpanda’s streaming and agentic AI services for the enterprise.

“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, and is recognized for authoring foundational texts such as the “Streaming 101” and “Streaming 102” blog posts and the O’Reilly book “Streaming Systems.” Most recently, he was a distinguished software engineer at Snowflake, 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.”

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