About

Roni Burd is a seasoned Head of Engineering at Amazon, currently leading the engineering organization that makes AWS Athena the fastest and easiest serverless engine on top of DataLakes with open standards. With over 15 years of experience working in the query engines, storage engines, and compute platform for database systems and ML processing, Roni is an expert in building platforms and developer tools. He has worked on several relevant tools such as AWS Athena, Amazon.com big data platform, Cosmos, Azure Data Lake, and HDInsight. Roni has a strong track record of delivering great solutions and managing large teams. He has grown revenue by 3x and improved infra margins by 50%, grown the team by 6x from the ground up by personally hiring >80 engineers, and started a dedicated query engine team that launched two engine versions (v2 and v3) and kept 60 days OSS currency. Roni has also reduced control plane operational load by 90%, improved TPC-DS performance by 5x, and improved reliability from 99% to 99.98%. Roni has made strategic decisions such as being the first AWS product and contributors with Apache Iceberg support and directional decisions for the engine codebase. He has closed critical gaps like UPDATE/DELETE/MERGE, native row-level security, and owns strategic customer interactions, yearly plans, and cost reductions. Roni has worked as a Senior Manager for Amazon's BigData platform and as a Principal Engineering Manager for Microsoft's Cosmos/SCOPE. He has a Master's degree in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Universidad de Mendoza. Roni's tech stack includes AWS, Amazon Athena, Azure, product management, ML, Research Scientist, and infra. With 18.79 years of relevant experience, Roni is a highly skilled and experienced Head of Engineering who brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to his work.