About

Reza Shiftehfar is a highly experienced and versatile Engineer/Manager with over 15 years of Software Engineering experience in Infrastructure, Big Data, Distributed Systems, Storage Systems, System Design, and web-scale technologies. He has also spent over 10 years in Engineering Leadership, leading large teams and building & scaling teams from the ground up in fast-growing environments. Shiftehfar is currently the Head of Storage & Compute Infrastructure - AI/ML at Apple, where he is leading core Storage & Compute infrastructures both on premise and in the cloud. Shiftehfar has a strong technical domain knowledge and has architected, designed, and built large scale data infrastructure/platform solutions on Big Data to support Data Scientists, Analytics, Machine Learning (ML), BI, Dashboards leveraging both Cloud and On-Perfm/In-house solutions. He is a known public speaker in Tech events and has published and presented in more than 30 papers and international conferences. Prior to his current role, Shiftehfar founded Uber’s data platform team and organized/scaled the group by hiring 60+ engineers/managers during Uber’s critical growth period of 2014 to 2020. He laid out the strategy, roadmap, architecture for data infrastructure at Uber to become the source-of-truth for all ML, data science, analytical use-cases across the company while scaling the platform from a few TeraBytes of data to 200+ PetaByttes and reducing data latency from 48 hours down to 10 minutes. Shiftehfar has expertise in Big Data technologies such as Kafka, Hadoop, HDFS, Spark, Avro, Parquet, HBase, Cassandra, Yarn, Zookeeper, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Graphite, Batch/Streaming/Lambda processing, and cloud solutions such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) (i.e. EKS, EC2, S3, Glacier, Dynamo...) and Google Cloud (Pub/Sub, BigTable, BigQuery, Beam, Spanner,...). He is passionate about technology and always interested in tweaking, hacking, and exploring new trends. Shiftehfar holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, an MCS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, an MS in Civil Engineering - Construction Management from the University of Illinois, and a BS in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. He is currently