Jeff Dean is an American computer scientist and software engineer who joined Google as employee #24 in 1999 and now serves as the company's Chief Scientist.1 A co-founder of the Google Brain team, he has architected many of Google's planet-scale systems and steered the company's most ambitious artificial-intelligence efforts.2 His work underpins products used by billions, and his research has earned election to the National Academy of Engineering and the ACM Prize in Computing.3
Pioneering Distributed Computing Systems
Dean co-designed MapReduce, Bigtable and Spanner—foundational technologies that allow Google to process petabytes of data reliably across thousands of machines.1 These ideas sparked open-source ecosystems like Hadoop and inspired modern cloud datastores, cementing his reputation as one of the foremost architects of large-scale computing infrastructure.
Guiding Google DeepMind AI Research
After co-founding the Google Brain project in 2011, Dean was appointed head of Google AI in 2018 and became Google's Chief Scientist when Brain merged with DeepMind in 2023.2 He now directs research on state-of-the-art models such as PaLM and Gemini, overseeing advances in language, vision and multimodal reasoning that ripple through Google products and the wider AI community.
Championing Responsible and Accessible AI Innovation
Beyond technical breakthroughs, Dean advocates for open-sourcing tools like TensorFlow and for reducing the environmental impact of machine-learning workloads.4 Through the Hopper-Dean Foundation he and his wife fund diversity programs in STEM, reflecting his commitment to making the benefits of AI broadly accessible and ethically grounded.5