Raffi Krikorian

Raffi Krikorian (Armenian: Րաֆֆի Գրիգորեան; born 1978) is an Armenian-American software engineer, and currently serves as Chief Technology Officer of the Democratic National Committee.. He was the Engineering Director at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center. He’s credited with unleashing self-driving cars onto Pittsburgh, PA. He was the former VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter where he was in charge of the backend infrastructure for all of Twitter up to August 2014. He's credited with leading the charge to improve the reliability of Twitter as well as the move from Ruby to the JVM. He currently also serves on the board of directors of the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan, Armenia.

Krikorian attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a student of Neil Gershenfeld's. His work involved creating a new kind of network for everyday devices called "Internet-0" (an analogue to the Internet of Things). Along with Gershenfeld, he also taught a class entitled "How To Make (Almost) Anything". He also worked on an interactive location service for software agents called Wherehoo.

He was also "an unapologetic TiVo fanatic.", and wrote "TiVo Hacks" (O'Reilly Media 2003).

Krikorian also was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communication at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. There, he developed two classes entitled "Every Bit You Make" and "Physical Computing without Computers".

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