Stephen Watt

CEO

Austin, Texas, United States30 yrs 6 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Led large teams in AI and emerging technologies.
Pioneered Hadoop and Big Data initiatives.
Strong focus on innovation and open source collaboration.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Big Data and AI expert with extensive leadership in open source technologies.

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Skills

Core Skills

Artificial Intelligence (ai)Engineering ManagementResearch And Development (r&d)

Other Skills

Open SourceInnovation ManagementEnergy ManagementBig DataHadoopLeadershipStrategyIntellectual PropertyBusiness PlanningGo-to-market StrategyPre-salesDistributed SystemsCloud ComputingEnterprise ArchitectureSoftware Engineering

About

An engineering leader of research and emerging technologies teams defining the future, bringing it to life and successfully graduating prototypes into the product portfolio.

Experience

Red hat

3 roles

Vice President, Distinguished Engineer, Office of the CTO

Promoted

Nov 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 4 mos

I was an early contributor to the Hadoop, Spark and Kubernetes projects and am now currently focused on the PyTorch and vLLM ecosystem. I am a PyTorch ambassador and represent Red Hat on the PyTorch foundation board and x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group. I lead the Office of the CTO, which is a division of 150 software engineers and researchers that set the Red Hat technology vision and span the Red Hat Research group (research.redhat.com) and the Red Hat Emerging Technology group (next.redhat.com). Current major focus areas involve Artificial intelligence Platforms (vLLM, PyTorch, llm-d, GPU Kernel frameworks), Using RAG/RAFT and Agentic frameworks to apply AI within our internal engineering processes and operations, Energy Management (Kepler, PEAKS), Zero Trust, PQC, Emerging Hardware and AI Accelerator Platforms and Sovereign and Private AI.

Research and Development (R&D)Engineering ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Open SourceInnovation Management

Distinguished Engineer, Head of Emerging Technologies

Promoted

Dec 2014 – Nov 2021 · 6 yrs 11 mos

I led the Red Hat Emerging Technologies group (http://next.redhat.com), which is an engineering function of 75 software engineers and managers, reporting to the Red Hat CTO. We work across open source communities, product management & product engineering to identify, develop and align emerging technologies with Red Hat's product portfolio.
Focus areas include Quantum Computing, Cloud Platforms, Distributed Systems, Software Defined Storage, Software Defined Networking, Edge Computing and Cloud Security for Enterprise Software.

Research and Development (R&D)Engineering Management

Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, Big Data

Dec 2012 – Dec 2014 · 2 yrs

Technical Executive responsible for:
Corporate Big Data technology strategy and roadmap
Leading the Open Source Big Data Engineering teams working within the Apache Software Foundation (Hadoop, BigTop and Ambari projects) and the Tachyon, Ceph and Gluster projects.
Leading Big Data Product Development and Engineering for the Red Hat Storage Business Unit (Ceph and GlusterFS).
Leading the Big Data Partner Engineering teams across Intel, Cloudera, Hortonworks and Continuum Analytics
Reference Architectures (Hadoop on RHEL and OpenJDK, Hadoop on Red Hat Storage, Hadoop on OpenStack)
Investment in explorations of Big Data related emerging technologies across Analytics, Performance, Virtualization, Cloud, Management Tooling and Distributed FileSystems
Technical Evangelism, Press and Analyst Briefings

Research and Development (R&D)Engineering Management

Hp

Hadoop Chief Technologist

Feb 2011 – Dec 2012 · 1 yr 10 mos · Austin, Texas Area

Founder of the HP Hadoop Program. As Chief Technologist, I was responsible for:
Technology Strategy and 3 year HP Hadoop Product Roadmap
Leading the Engineering of HP Appliances, Reference Architectures, Servers and Software for Apache Hadoop.
Designing and creating the HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop, a full or half rack Hadoop Appliance. I designed and wrote the HP Reference Architectures for Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks. I assisted in the Server Design of the HP ProLiant SL4500 Server Series and HP Moonshot Gemini cartridges for Apache Hadoop.
Performance Engineering. My team set the worlds fastest 10TB and Single Rack Hadoop TeraSort Benchmarks.
Pre-Sales, Solution Architecture and Hadoop Rack and Cluster Design for HPs Hadoop Customers. Some of which have the largest Hadoop Clusters in the world.
Cross-BU Internal alignment with Vertica and Autonomy. Alignment with the HP Technology and Enterprise Services organizations in building out Hadoop platform and application consulting practices and Investment in Research and Emerging Technologies with HP Labs.
Technical Evangelism, Liaison to the Open Source community, Press and Analyst Briefings

Research and Development (R&D)

Ibm emerging technologies

2 roles

Software Architect

Promoted

Jan 2006 – Feb 2011 · 5 yrs 1 mo · Austin, Texas Area

Created the IBM Hadoop Distribution and managed the internal IBM Hadoop Community.
Served as the IBM Hadoop Lead and contributed to the Hadoop Project at the Apache Software Foundation on behalf of IBM
Part of the Emerging Tech team that developed IBM BigSheets, a Spreadsheet interface for Hadoop now part of IBM InfoSphere BigInsights.
Part of the Emerging Tech team that developed QEDWiki, a LAMP Based Mashup Maker that now exists as IBM Lotus Mashups.

Research and Development (R&D)

Software Architect

Apr 2001 – Jan 2006 · 4 yrs 9 mos · Austin, Texas Area

As a Software Architect I was responsible for leading a variety of teams in the Design, Development, Testing and Deployment of:
Web Service Interfaces for IBM ITIL Service Delivery Products
Custom B2B Web Service Platform Integration solutions between IBM and their Service Delivery partners. Some of these were for very large outsourcing accounts, such as General Motors.
Consolidated Messaging Integration hubs for B2B integration of multiple partners

Mshow.com

Software Engineer

Jan 2001 – Apr 2001 · 3 mos · Austin, Texas Area

Product Development using the Microsoft stack for a Web Conferencing startup that ran out of funding.

Amj business solutions

Software Engineer

Jun 1999 – Dec 2000 · 1 yr 6 mos · Cape Town Area, South Africa

Product Development for a CRM SaaS offering using the Microsoft stack (Visual Studio, OLTP and OLAP Platforms).

Infosol / computer configurations middle east

Systems Engineer

Jan 1997 – Jan 1999 · 2 yrs · Saudi Arabia

Systems Engineer for a Microsoft and Lotus Solution Provider. Java and Visual Studio Application Development and Microsoft Back Office Installations (Exchange, SQL servers, IIS, Windows NT)