Raffi Krikorian
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SM, Media Arts and Science / Physics and Media 2002-01-01 - 2004-01-01
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MEng, EECS 2001-01-01 - 2002-01-01
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SB, EECS 1996-01-01 - 2000-01-01Work Experience
Emerson Collective
Current
Emerson Collective
The Technically Optimistic podcast
Current
The Technically Optimistic podcast
Tumo Center for Creative Technologies
Current
Tumo Center for Creative Technologies
Mozilla.ai
Current
Mozilla.ai
Mozilla
Current
Mozilla
Medic
Current
Medic
MIT Media Lab
Current
MIT Media Lab
Aurelia Institute
Current
Aurelia Institute
Sundance Institute
Current
Sundance Institute
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
2023-05-01 - 2024-07-01
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Summary
I want to help make the world a better place, and I feel we can use technology not just to make apps, but to really make an impact on people’s lives. I'm very passionate about educating people around the nuances of technology - so much so, that I now run a podcast on the topic. Search for "Technically Optimistic" wherever you get your podcasts (Apple podcasts, Spotify, etc.). And subscribe to my newsletter at technicallyoptimistic.substack.com. I’m the former CTO of the Democratic National Committee, where I worked really hard to make technology a focus for the Democrats. I wanted to make sure every campaign, up and down the ballot, could have industry quality technology and analytics tools to help them talk to voters on topics that engage them, and on mediums that they prefer. Before that, I was the Director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, and was responsible for the launch of the first ever self-driving fleet on September 14, 2016 into Pittsburgh, PA. You can see some of my work at http://www.popsci.com/uber-raffi-krikorian-driverless-car, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/14/493823483/self-driving-cars-take-to-the-streets-of-pittsburgh-courtesy-of-uber, and http://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2016/09/14/uber-self-driving-car-cnnmoney.cnn. Finally, before Uber, I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter where I was directly responsible for reliability and efficiency: we built everything from the custom storage engines, to the compute / scheduling engines that ran in the datacenters, the core business logic of Twitter (the Tweet service, User service, Timeline service), to the APIs that power the third party ecosystem as well as the Twitter clients. During the World Cup of 2010, Twitter was down repeatedly due to load - during the World Cup of 2014, Twitter survived record traffic with nearly five 9s of uptime.
