Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) has hired Jeff Naughton, a database researcher and ACM Fellow, as Technical Fellow, the company announced. Naughton will work with Snowflake's engineering teams on data platform development for AI workloads.

Naughton was part of the Gamma project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a parallel database system developed under David DeWitt that pioneered shared-nothing architecture for distributing data and executing queries across clusters of commodity computers. The Gamma team received the 2008 ACM Software System Award. Naughton was named an ACM Fellow in 2002.

Before joining Snowflake, Naughton served as Senior Vice President and Fellow at Celonis. Prior to that, he spent six years as a Distinguished Scientist at Google, where he worked on scalable data management systems and led its Madison engineering office. He also spent more than two decades at UW–Madison, holding the John P. Morgridge Professorship, and earlier served as an assistant professor at Princeton University.

At Snowflake, Naughton will collaborate with Anupam Datta, Principal Research Scientist and AI Research Lead, and Aditya Parameswaran, AI x Data Research Lead. He will also work to expand Snowflake's connections with the academic research community.

"The opportunity to strengthen the flow of ideas between academia and industry while helping build the next generation of data infrastructure is exactly why I'm here," Naughton said in a statement.