Snowflake hires database scientist Jeff Naughton

Snowflake announced on October 12, 2026, that database scientist Jeff Naughton has joined the company as Technical Fellow. In this role, Naughton will collaborate with engineering teams to adapt enterprise data infrastructure for the requirements of artificial intelligence agents.

Naughton will work alongside Anupam Datta, Principal Research Scientist and AI Research Lead, and Aditya Parameswaran, AI x Data Research Lead. His focus includes translating research advances into platform capabilities for Snowflake's more than 14,500 customers and strengthening ties with the academic research community.

Before joining Snowflake, Naughton served as Senior Vice President and Fellow at Celonis. He previously worked for six years as a Distinguished Scientist at Google, where he led the Madison engineering office and focused on scalable data management systems.

Earlier in his career, Naughton spent more than two decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the John P. Morgridge Professorship, after serving as an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He became an ACM Fellow in 2002 and co-won the 2008 ACM Software System Award for his contributions to Gamma, a parallel database system developed at UW-Madison.