Professional bio
Anees Shaikh is a Principal Engineer with the Global Networking and Infrastructure team at Google where he works on software systems that support management, control, and security in Google’s production networks. While at Google, Anees has been the overall Tech Lead for two projects that were awarded the company-wide Technical Impact Award, in addition to several Technical Impact awards for projects advancing capabilities for Google Cloud’s network infrastructure.
Prior to joining Google, Anees was the Chief SDN Architect in the System Networking product group at IBM, where he was responsible for IBM’s software-defined networking product architecture and technical strategy, working across engineering, QA, product management, and sales organizations. He also led IBM’s engagement in open source SDN initiatives, including OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Open Networking Foundation.
Anees was a member of Research Staff at the T.J. Watson Research Center for over a decade, leading projects and teams in all three major divisions of IBM Research (software, services, and systems). His work at Watson spanned a broad area of systems and networking research, including Web and Internet performance, early work on utility computing models that grew into modern cloud computing platforms, and several areas of system management that contributed to the state of the art in virtualization management and problem management.
Work experience
Anees has experience in a variety of technical roles, including as an individual contributor and technical lead managing small teams of talented engineers, and leading Director-level organizations spanning multiple global locations. He started and grew Google’s first development team in India focused on Global Networking technology, and advised a number of teams across Google networking in successfully establishing engineering presence in India.
Anees regularly engages the wider industry to solve problems, especially through open source initiatives. He founded the OpenConfig project to build vendor-neutral management systems with network operators and equipment vendors, and earlier was a co-creator of the OpenDaylight SDN controller project. Anees is a founding member of the Technical Steering Committee for the Paraglider open source project, an effort to abstract and simplify traditional low-level cloud networking APIs that started as a research collaboration with UC Berkeley and other organizations. He has also initiated collaborations with major cloud and service providers to accelerate deployment and adoption of Internet routing security protections, engaging via the MANRS initiative and industry, research, and government organizations. Anees has been an invited speaker in numerous industry forums, giving technical talks on topics including software-defined networking, network management, and routing security.
Anees is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, and remains involved with the academic research community through collaborations with faculty, and hosting many undergraduate and Ph.D. student interns. He has published widely in the areas of networking, cloud computing, and system management in top systems conferences and workshops, and continues to serve on program committees.
Personal
Anees was born and grew up on the East coast of the U.S., completing most schooling in Northern Virginia before undergraduate and graduate studies. He was a member of the first graduating class of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where he was active in student journalism and sports.
Anees currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. Outside of work, he enjoys fitness activities, watching British TV, and staycations with family.