Ari Gesher

Ari Gesher is a technologist and software generalist who has split his career between systems engineering, software engineering. In his 17 year career, he’s worked at a number of startups, was the maintainer of the SourceForge.net open source software repository before the word ‘github’ even existed, and landed at Palantir as an very early engineer in 2006 (after dropping out of his undergrad education at University of Illinois for a second time).

At Palantir, Ari started working on backend systems. His first feature was implementing the metadata tagging for Palantir’s platforms that are the foundation of all privacy-protective access controls. In his time at Palantir, he’s worked on both Palantir’s Philanthropic Engineering Team and the Privacy & Civil Liberties Team, as well as overseeing Palantir’s Open Source efforts. Today, when he gets a chance to code, he’s busy re-inventing himself in the UX domain, working as a rapid prototyper for Palantir’s Product Design team.

An actor, improv-comedian, and seasoned public speaker, Ari has branched out into speaking on and writing about all manner of technical topics - especially in the sphere of ‘big data’ and the limits of automated decision-making. He excels at decoding complex technical topics in to a digestible form, drawing on a love of the history of computing as the lens through which to view the future. Ari has been featured at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference, The Lean Startup Conference, GigaOm Structure, MIT's Technology Review's EmTech Conference, Harvard Business School, the Institute for the Future's Tech Horizons Conference, the Economist Future Technologies Summit, and PayPal's TechXploration series.

Ari lives in Menlo Park, California (one of the birthplaces of the Internet) with his wife, Nicole and their two small children.