Paul Whitney Chief People Officer, Databricks

Databricks Inc., provider of the Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark, announced two key executive hires to accelerate hiring and ramp its product investment in response to its rapid global growth.

Based in San Francisco, CA, the company welcomes Paul Whitney as its first chief people officer and David Meyer as SVP of product management.

“We’re thrilled to add such seasoned and impressive leaders to the Databricks team,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO, Databricks. “As we continue building out the Databricks team rapidly across the globe, Paul will play a critical role in leading our growth. And with our customer-obsessed culture comes significant investment in new capabilities for our cloud product and David will spearhead that effort.”

Paul Whitney will hold the responsibility for leading key people strategies at Databricks, including talent acquisition, talent development, culture, engagement and people operations. In this role, he will leverage his expertise in building and implementing strategies and processes that drive organizational performance. He most recently held similar roles at Infinera and Nimble Storage, where he was a member of the executive teams that led both companies through IPOs and multiple years of revenue and headcount growth. At Nimble, he oversaw the company’s growth from 300 to 1,500 employees in less than 4 years.

David Meyer will be leading product management. Prior to joining, he served as the VP of product management and GM at OneLogin, where he oversaw product management, and previously engineering. Before his work at OneLogin, he co-founded UniversityNow and ran product, engineering and UX. While at UniversityNow, he built a team that created an open university system in 11 months, earning accolades from Gates Foundation and the Department of Education. He also ran the BusinessObjects business at SAP, and before that product management for Plumtree, an early leader in portal software, which went public and then was acquired by BEA in 2005.