Derek Beard

Derek Beard is a well-rounded technical leader with over 20 years of experience in networking and storage technologies. He has co-architected and co-developed multiple first-generation products and was an early employee at three startups.

His expertise includes performance architecture, multi-core optimized data plane, high throughput systems, and distributed systems. Derek is adept at transitioning to new technologies in networking, storage, and operating system internals.

In the realm of networking, he specializes in data center networking, Ethernet switch architecture and programming, L2-L4 network stacks, and SDN. In storage, his skills encompass NFS, filesystem and block IO subsystems, file system, block caching, and object storage.

Derek's compute expertise covers IaaS services, hypervisor/virtualization, Kubernetes, workload lifecycle management, and workload mobility. He is also passionate about technologies like crypto, Ethereum, DeFi, and MEV.

Proficient in a range of programming languages including C, C++, Java, Scala, and Golang, Derek is currently expanding his skills to include Rust. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor's degree in Math/Computer Science from Pepperdine University.

Derek Beard has held key roles at respected organizations such as VMware, where he served as a Senior Staff Engineer. Previously, he was a Principal Engineer and Object Storage Architect at NetApp, with experience as a Lead Architect at CacheIQ and an architect at TippingPoint. Derek has also contributed as a Principal Software Engineer at Storspeed Inc, Mirage Networks, Inc., Surgient Networks, Inc., Crossroads Systems, and IBM Corporation.