Former VMware VP Julia Austin Joins DigitalOcean as CTO

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Cloud computing platform DigitalOcean is following up news about its new Indian data center with another big announcement this month: the company has hired Julia Austin as CTO.

According to DigitalOcean, Austin will lead product and engineering in her role at the company. She spent the last few years as an advisor and investor to early stage companies, while also teaching product management at the Harvard Business School.

Previously, Austin worked for eight years at VMware, where she managed expansion of the engineering organization, eventually serving as the company's VP of innovation. Prior to VMware she was VP of engineering at Akamai.

DigitalOcean hired its first CTO in December 2014, bringing Google’s James Cariello on board to act in that capacity. His stint at DigitalOcean was a short one, ending after only 6 months, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is currently back at Google.

“There have been only two other times in my career when I’ve come across an opportunity with a company so exciting that it keeps me up at night,” Austin said in a statement. “What DigitalOcean has delivered in just a few short years is a true testament to where the company is headed, and I’m thrilled to be a part of the team as we bring robust and simple cloud infrastructure to market.”

“Julia’s experience leading engineering at both Akamai and VMware as well as many other tech startups will be invaluable to our organization,” Ben Uretsky, CEO and co-founder of DigitalOcean, said in a statement. “We’re excited to welcome Julia to the team to drive our product roadmap and help DigitalOcean continue to be the cloud platform of choice for developers worldwide.”

This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/digitalocean-names-former-vmware-akamai-engineering-lead-cto