James Cowling

James Cowling is the technical lead and manager of the Storage Infrastructure team at Dropbox. He spends his time thinking about durability, exabyte-scale storage systems, and simple solutions to difficult problems. James received his PhD at MIT specializing in distributed transaction processing, and conducted research in distributed systems, fault tolerance, and consensus protocols. He left academia for industry to build the systems he used to research, focusing on the practical realities of large-scale systems design.