With over 25 years’ experience working for Intel, Sun Microsystems, McDATA, and Teradata, as well as successfully starting, scaling and selling two tech companies, Raj is one of the Silicon Valley’s best engineers.

After graduating with a Master’s in Computer Science from Arizona State, Raj joined Intel where he spent more than three years before joining Sun Microsystems, where he architected and led the performance modelling of the UltraSPARC IIIi processor. In 2000 just after the dot-com bubble burst, he took the courageous decision to start his own business, founding Sanera Systems, a Bay Area start-up that focused on mission-critical, high-performance SAN switches. It was a move that paid off, as the business raised over $70m in venture capital from top tier firms including: Greylock, Goldman, E-Trade, Storm Ventures, and Enterprise Partners, before being acquired by McDATA Corporation in 2003 for over $100m. At McDATA, Cherabuddi served as the CTO, where he advised on strategy and was responsible for the development of future technologies.

In 2006, Raj co-founded Kickfire, a Silicon Valley based start-up that specialized in building an In-Memory Analytics Platform. The business raised over $30m from Accel, Greylock, and Mayfield to build the industry’s first out-of-the-box, high performance MySQL appliance for analytics and reporting. In 2010, the business was acquired by Teradata (NYSE: TDC), where Raj remained for eight years. During his tenure at Teradata, Raj led an advanced R&D team to build future generation products utilizing Kickfire’s dataflow computing paradigm.

At OakNorth, Raj will provide operational and strategic leadership to the engineering organisation, helping to drive a strong engineering culture and continuing to build out the credit analysis and monitoring capabilities of the OakNorth platform. OakNorth’s platform enables banks to make faster and more-informed credit decisions and enables a better borrowing experience for businesses. It is being leveraged by banks around the world, including: PNC, Customers Bank and Modern Bank in the US, NIBC and OIMIO in the Netherlands, and OakNorth’s own bank in the UK.

Jackson Hull, CTO at OakNorth, said: "Raj has a great depth and breadth of experience building top tier enterprise software, as well as a proven track record in successfully building multiple tech companies. His expertise will be invaluable as we continue to build our world-class engineering team and our next-generation credit science platform. With recent partnerships announced with some of the largest banks in the world, it is an incredibly exciting time for Raj to be joining us.”

Raj Cherabuddi, VP of Engineering at OakNorth, continued: “As an entrepreneur myself, I was drawn to OakNorth’s mission-driven and founder-led approach, as well as the positive impact its platform could have on growth businesses in communities and economies worldwide. Having worked for some of the most-established software companies in the world, I’m excited about the potential of the platform, and look forward to working with Jackson and the broader engineering team to develop it further.”