Kenneth Duda — Co-Founder, CTO & Senior VP of Software Engineering at Arista Networks

Mr. Kenneth Duda, also known as Ken, Co-founded Arista Networks, Inc. in 2004 and has been its Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Software Engineering since September 2011. Mr. Duda is a pioneer in high-performance networking software and is the lead architect of Arista Networks EOS - a stateful modular operating system for all Arista Networks products. From 2005 to 2008, Ken was also the Acting President of Arista Networks. Prior to Arista Networks, he served as Chief Technology Officer of There.com, where he played a lead role in designing a real-time 3-D distributed system that scaled to thousands of simultaneous users. His first Ph.D. project at Stanford became the nucleus for Granite Systems, the leader in gigabit Ethernet switches, where Mr. Duda was the fourth employee. After Cisco Systems purchased Granite, he continued his leadership role by developing and implementing the Switch Kernel, system software that manages Granite's proprietary 24-gigabit Ethernet switching hardware, provides an execution environment for user-level management agents and ships with the Catalyst 5000 Gigabit Ethernet Module, the Catalyst 4003 Supervisor, the Catalyst 2948 and the Catalyst 4912. Mr. Duda has three simultaneous CS degrees from MIT. Mr. Duda has 3 simultaneous engineering degrees from MIT and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.