Urs Holzle

Urs Hölzle oversees the design and operation of the network infrastructure that powers Google’s sprawling services. On top of orchestrating the unseen world of servers and data centers running the search giant’s apps, Hölzle develops the software infrastructure that keeps everything afloat. Lately, he’s spending his time on Google’s Cloud Platform, expanding the reach of his team’s pioneering infrastructure work to developers around the world. (His team’s research and design efforts led to a ground-breaking data center architecture that cuts average power consumption in half.) Urs joined Google as its eighth employee and first vice president of engineering after having been an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, he contributed to the efficient implementation of virtual machines for programming languages such as Java.

Urs Hölzle is Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. In this capacity Urs oversees the design, installation, and operation of the servers, networks, and datacenters that power Google's services. Through efficiency innovations, Urs and his team have reduced the energy used by Google data centers to less than 50% of the industry average. Urs is renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's top dog).

Urs grew up in Switzerland and received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and, as a Fulbright scholar, a Ph.D. from Stanford. While at Stanford (and then a small start-up that was later acquired by Sun Microsystems) he invented fundamental techniques used in most of today's leading Java compilers. Before joining Google he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.