Facebook infrastructure and Big Data guru Jay Parikh has a new gig. No, Parikh isn't leaving Facebook. But he and Enrique Salem -- the former CEO of security software company Symantec -- are both joining the board of Atlassian, an Australia-based software company that makes all sorts of cool tools for software developers.
"It's not full time, but I'll help out where I can," Parikh says.
As vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, Parikh is responsible for making sure the hardware and software underpinning the social network run smoothly. With tens of thousands of servers spread across data centers on four continents, that's no easy task.
He has developed a reputation for running edgy projects that help Facebook deal with its massive scale. He oversees the open source server hardware initiative Open Compute, which brought Facebook's custom server, network gear, and data center designs to the public, and he leads experiments like Cold Storage, a scheme to put rarely accessed content such as old photos into servers that power off when not in use. But he says he's more of a software guy at heart, having overseen projects such as the big data tool Scuba.
Atlassian sells collaboration tools for developers, including its flagship bug tracking application JIRA and the code management system Stash. Parikh admits that Facebook doesn't actually use Atlassian products, but he knows them well.
"We've built a lot of our own tools internally and have open sourced some of them, like Phabricator," he says. "But I did use their product at my last company and was a pretty big fan of some of their stuff."
Why join the Atlassian board? "The most important thing for me was to work with great people," he says. He was introduced to Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes by Accel Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested in Atlassian. "I spent time with Scott and Mike and was really impressed with their culture, their vision for developer productivity. We, the infrastructure team at Facebook, are also responsible for making the developer team as efficient as possible."
Atlassian is also offering a cloud service called Atlassian OnDemand that could make use of Parikh's expertise in scaling data center operations. Parikh says it's too early to say whether Atlassian will end up using OpenCompute for OnDemand. It will depend on what the company's needs are, he says.
"The board seat is a longterm commitment, so I need to do whatever Scott and Mike need me to do," he says.
