Tirthankar Lahiri has joined Google as Vice President of Engineering, Spanner, where he will lead engineering for Google Spanner, the company’s globally distributed database service. His move follows a 31-year career at Oracle, where he held several senior engineering and technology leadership positions focused on database systems, in-memory computing and mission-critical data technologies.
Announcing his departure from Oracle, Lahiri reflected on his three-decade association with the company and acknowledged the colleagues and teams he worked with during his tenure. “It’s been an amazing 31 years at Oracle working with some of the smartest minds in the database industry, on multiple pioneering efforts that helped to transform data management. To my amazing team, I leave with the deepest admiration and appreciation for your efforts, and to my many amazing colleagues and to my leadership team, I have nothing but gratitude for all your support and encouragement. I look forward to your continued success and will cheer you all from the sidelines,” he said.
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At Oracle, Lahiri most recently served as Senior Vice President, Mission-Critical Data and AI Engines, a position he held from May 2024. He previously led the company’s Data and In-Memory Technologies organisation as Senior Vice President and Vice President. His responsibilities included managing Oracle’s Database Data, Space and Transaction (DST) team and the TimesTen In-Memory Database engineering team. The DST group worked on core database capabilities, including indexing, transaction processing, space management, Advanced Compression, Flashback Query and Total Recall.
Lahiri also spent several years leading the development of Oracle TimesTen, an in-memory database designed for applications requiring high throughput and real-time processing. The technology supports online transaction processing (OLTP) and business intelligence workloads and has been used in sectors such as telecommunications and financial services. Earlier in his Oracle career, he led the Distributed Cache and Memory Management Group, working on database caching and automated memory management. He began his association with the company in 1995 as a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Distributed Cache Group, contributing to cache management capabilities within the Oracle Database kernel, including work related to Cache Fusion, a key technology behind Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
Lahiri’s areas of specialisation include artificial intelligence, application development, extreme-scale systems, high availability, in-memory architectures, performance engineering, scalability and self-managing systems. His profile also lists 81 issued patents, with several additional patents pending. His move to Google comes as distributed database systems and scalable data infrastructure remain important to enterprises building applications that require high availability, performance and the ability to manage data across large-scale environments.
