Alluxio, the developer of the open source data orchestration platform for data driven workloads such as large-scale analytics and AI/ML, has appointed Sridhar Venkatesh to the new position of SVP of product reporting to Alluxio Founder and CEO, Haoyuan (HY) Li. He will lead product management and product marketing efforts as demand for scaling distributed AI and machine learning workloads in the cloud accelerates.

Sridhar brings over 20 years of product experience in both startups as well as larger companies. Most recently, he was VP Product at Avalara where he was responsible for their content business, data infrastructure and AI/ML platform. He joined Avalara through their acquisition of Indix, a startup he co-founded to build a big data platform for product information.

Prior to Indix, Sridhar served as CEO of CARC, an Alcatel joint-venture focused on expanding broadband penetration across India and other developing countries.

Earlier, Sridhar led a product team at Cerent, one of Cisco’s largest acquisitions, and co-founded Caymas, an enterprise security startup sold to Citrix. He holds a BS and MS in electrical engineering from MIT and started his career working on GM’s electrical vehicle in the early 90s.