Brian Beach CTO, Backblaze

Backblaze, Inc. announced that Dr. Brian Beach has been named CTO, effective November 7, 2022.

Brian Wilson, who has served as CTO since 2007, will remain an employee at company and will become inveterate software engineer, as well as serve in an advisory CTO capacity until the end of the year.

“I am excited to congratulate Beach on this well-deserved promotion, which is a testament to his leadership skills and his central role in architecting our storage cloud as well as the products it enables,” said Gleb Budman, CEO and chairperson of the board. “Beach has an extraordinary ability to lead architectural strategy and define the technologies and systems that Backblaze will use to meet the needs of our business and our customers today and into the future.”

He continued: “I also want to thank Wilson for his leadership over the past 15 years. He co-founded and led the company through incredible transformation and growth. He is a remarkable leader whose impact has extended far beyond the scaling of our technology infrastructure. He has nurtured a culture of innovation and inclusion, and has served as a trusted partner to me and leaders across Backblaze.”

Beach has been with Backblaze for more than 9 years and serves as distinguished engineer. A deep history with the company, he was the first customer in 2008. Over the course of his tenure, he has played a role in initiatives such as building next-gen distributed storage solutions, implementing the B2 Cloud Storage service, and reporting on HDD performance and reliability. Most recently, he has expanded his role to include overall system architecture.

He commented: “I have been following Backblaze since day one and have always been a fan. When I joined Backblaze in 2013 as a distinguished engineer, Backblaze was a company of 21 employees. I’ve witnessed the company grow and am excited to expand my role as we continue to scale the company.”

Wilson added: “Five of us launched Backblaze because we recognized a simple problem that needed to be solved: Too many people were losing their data. I’m proud of the past 15 years of protecting hundreds of thousands of customers and now enabling them to do even more with their data, and I am confident and happy to pass the torch to Beach who will continue to execute on the company’s ambitious goals. I look forward to continuing to work with him as well as the rest of the amazing team here at Backblaze.”

Beach brings over 40 years of engineering experience to his new role as CTO. Prior to Backblaze, he worked as the VP and principal engineer for TiVo where he was instrumental in building the world’s first Digital Video Recorder. He has also held senior engineering positions at Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Information Science, and his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of California, Santa Cruz.