# Stavros Harizopoulos

> Principal Engineer at Google

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/stavros

Software engineer with deep expertise in databases, analytics, distributed systems, and cloud services. Current role: Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and Tech Lead for Cloud Dataproc. Previous roles: Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Facebook's Data Infrastructure team, Principal Engineer and Tech Lead at AWS Redshift, co-founder of Amiato, a managed ETL service, acquired by Amazon in 2014. Before that, held research-scientist positions at HP and MIT, focusing on in- memory and column-store databases. Bay-area based, C/C++ programmer, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D., and Y Combinator alumnus.

For a list of patents/publications (ten SIGMOD/VLDB papers, ~5K citations) please see Google Scholar (goo.gl/6hgN98)

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer @ Google
Jan 2022 – Present

### Software Engineer @ Facebook
Jan 2017 – Jan 2022 | Menlo Park, CA
Member of Facebook's Data Infrastructure team.

### Principal Engineer @ Amazon Web Services
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Palo Alto, CA
Member of AWS Redshift, Tech Lead for Performance team, leading efforts on performance and scalability. Role also includes defining roadmap, providing guidance to other teams, mentoring, on-call rotation, and customer escalations.

### Co-Founder and CTO @ Amiato
Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | Palo Alto, CA
Amiato (formerly known as Nou Data) was a fully managed, real-time ETL cloud service, connecting unstructured-data sources to structured business intelligence (BI) tools. The underlying technology was Schema-lift, which automatically inferred the structure of semi-structured data (i.e., JSON logs), transformed it into tables, and loaded it into data warehouses. Led the initial architectural design of the core database service and worked on all early prototypes and later versions and components of the service. Helped grow team to nine members, and drive acquisition by Amazon in 2014.

### Researcher @ HP Labs
Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 | Palo Alto, CA
Worked on both industry-leading research and early-stage strategic projects. Projects included:
• Research on software-controlled energy use produced the first widely available study on the energy efficiency of commercial and open-source database servers, and provided direction for future research around energy proportionality (goo.gl/nGpFfF).
• Research on next-gen in-memory databases produced a blueprint for modern high-performance in-memory OLTP databases (work included in the 5th Ed. of the Red Book: goo.gl/oTsvEv).
• Worked on a scalable, distributed in-memory database that offered strongly consistent low-latency operations and complex on-the-fly analytics for financial trading applications (part of a customer collaboration).

### Researcher @ MIT
Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 | Cambridge, MA
Member of the MIT DB group. Early contributor to the C-Store and H-Store projects which were commercialized by Vertica and VoltDB, respectively.


## Education
### Ph.D. in Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

### 5-year Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering
Technical University of Crete


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/harizopoulos

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Source: https://flows.cv/stavros
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/stavros/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12