Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji

Career

Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji earned a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley in networking and distributed systems. Before joining Databricks, Tavakoli-Shiraji was an Associate Principal at McKinsey & Company, advising enterprises, vendors, and the public sector on topics including next-generation IT, cloud computing, and corporate strategy.³

Databricks lists Tavakoli-Shiraji among its seven founders, with Ali Ghodsi, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, and Andy Konwinski. Tavakoli-Shiraji is now Databricks' SVP of Field Engineering and spoke in the Tuesday keynote of the Data + AI Summit 2026.⁴¹

Products and projects

Tavakoli-Shiraji has co-written several Databricks announcements about opening its platform. A June 2022 post announced that Delta Lake 2.0 would make all Delta Lake APIs open source, and a June 2024 post announced the open-sourcing of Unity Catalog under the Apache 2.0 license, hosted at LF AI & Data.⁵²³

In June 2025, Tavakoli-Shiraji co-wrote the post introducing the lakebase, a database design that runs a managed Postgres engine over data kept in open formats in cloud object storage, and co-wrote the introduction of Lakebridge, a free tool for migrating legacy data warehouses to Databricks SQL.⁶⁷³

Work and contributions

• Unity Catalog Open-source code

  One of five bylined authors of the June 2024 Databricks post announcing that Unity Catalog was being open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and hosted at LF AI & Data. The unitycatalog/unitycatalog repository is Apache-2.0.²⁸

• Delta Lake 2.0 open-source release Open-source code

  Co-author, with Michael Armbrust, Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin, and Matei Zaharia, of the June 2022 post announcing that all Delta Lake APIs, including features previously limited to Databricks, were being open-sourced with Delta Lake 2.0.⁵³

Timeline

1. Jun 30, 2022Co-wrote the Databricks post announcing the fully open-source Delta Lake 2.0.⁵
2. Jun 13, 2024Co-wrote the Databricks post announcing the open-sourcing of Unity Catalog.²
3. Feb 13, 2025Co-wrote the Databricks post introducing SAP Databricks within SAP Business Data Cloud.⁹
4. Jun 12, 2025Co-wrote the Databricks post introducing the lakebase database design.⁶
5. Jun 12, 2025Co-wrote the Databricks post introducing the Lakebridge data migration tool.⁷

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Associate Principal, before joining Databricks, McKinsey & Company³

Where they work

• Databricks 11 people in the wiki

Related people

• Reynold XinAlso at Databricks
• Patrick WendellAlso at Databricks
• Nikhil ThoratAlso at Databricks
• Ali GhodsiAlso at Databricks
• Andy KonwinskiAlso at Databricks
• Jerry LiuDatasets and data
• Vaishaal ShankarDatasets and data
• Matthijs DouzeDatasets and data
• Avi SilDatasets and data
• Swabha SwayamdiptaDatasets and data