Software Engineering Daily · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Salish Krishna Murty, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud, shared his extensive career path in the database industry, beginning in the mid-90s with IBM's DB2. After pursuing a PhD in streaming databases at UC Berkeley and co-founding a startup that was acquired by Cisco, he moved to Amazon Web Services, contributing to the Aurora database system. He joined Google in 2019.
“I have been in the database industry for most of my professional career, started in the mid-90s. I worked at IBM, worked on DB2 and enterprise databases, then I did something a little crazy. I said, I like databases so much, I went to grad school.”
“I went back to grad school, sent my way to grad school, then I went to UC Berkeley, I did my PhD on streaming databases. I ended up starting a company around to try to commercialize my PhD work.”
“In the end, we sold our company to Cisco, and it was a very interesting opportunity, I learned about networking, a whole new space I didn't know anything about. And then I went to Amazon. I worked at AWS and I worked on a system called Aurora, and I was there for about five years, and I came to Google in 2019, and I've been here since.”