Who is Sanjay Ghemawat? Indian-American engineer behind Google's foundational systems departs after 27 years

For years, Sanjay Ghemawat has worked behind the scenes at Google, playing a key role in technologies that shaped the internet. Now, after nearly 27 years at Google, Ghemawat is stepping down, and he is finally entering the public spotlight with his new co-founded venture called Discovery Loop, alongside Jeff Dean, another big name at Google.  The venture plans to fully automate complex, multi-step scientific and engineering experiments.

Must read: Google DeepMind announces major leadership changes; Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO; All details

Who is Sanjay Ghemawat?

Sanjay Ghemawat was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1966 to an Indian-origin family. He did his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1987, and later earned a PhD in 1995 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a dissertation titled The Modified Object Buffer: A Storage Management Technique for Object-Oriented Databases.

Before Google even existed, Ghemawat worked at the DEC Systems Research Center, where he met Jeff Dean, who worked at another DEC research lab nearby. Dean joined Google first, and Ghemawat followed in 1999.

Together, they worked on several projects, including Google File System (GFS), MapReduce in 2004, which helped Google process enormous amounts of data, Hadoop, Bigtable with development of popular NoSQL databases, including HBase and Apache Cassandra, and Spanner, the world's first database.

Must read: Google Assistant to be replaced by Gemini starting September on Android and WearOS

In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), which is one of the highest professional honours for engineers in the United States. In 2012, he received the ACM Prize in Computing. Now Ghemawat is known as an American computer scientist and software engineer, and he left Google with his last title being Senior Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group.

Discovery Loop: Ghemawat’s new venture

After spending crucial years at Google, Ghemawat has co-founded a new venture, Discovery Loop, alongside Jeff Dean, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The venture is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, and its core mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering experiments to accelerate technological breakthroughs.

Discovery Loop has secured financial backing and a strategic computing/cloud partnership directly with Google's parent company, Alphabet. The company is also backed by investors like Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.