Urs Hölzle

Urs Hölzle
Urs Hölzle (2014)
Born1964 (age 6061)
Basel, Switzerland
Alma materETH Zurich
Stanford University
Known forJIT compilers, data centers, cloud computing, Google Cloud Platform
AwardsAAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, NAE Member
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
Google
ThesisAdaptive optimization for Self: Reconciling High Performance with Exploratory Programming (1994)
Doctoral advisorDavid Ungar
John L. Hennessy

Urs Hölzle (German pronunciation: [ˈʊrs ˈhœltslɛ]; born 1964) is a Swiss-American software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its engineering culture. His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking. Until July 2023, he was the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. In July 2023, he transitioned to being a Google Fellow only.