Omar Benjelloun

Omar Benjelloun was born and raised in Rabat, Morroco. At age 17, he moved to Paris to study. He obtained a M.Sc. in Engineering from ENST / Telecom Paris, then spent a few years writing software: He built the French Navy’s first website, worked on a couple IT systems for the Klee Group, and as a research engineer at INRIA.

At that point, he got bored and decided to go back to school. He went for a PhD in Databases with Prof S. Abiteboul, at University Paris XI Orsay & INRIA. During that time, he also taught classes at Orsay University & Ecole Polytechnique. After his PhD, Omar crossed the Atlantic and spent two years doing a postdoc at Stanford, with Profs H. Garcia-Molina & J. Widom.

Even though he loved research, Omar realized he cared more about building innovative software products that would improve the lives of a large number of people across the world, so he joined Google in Oct. 2006. He has been working there on systems for structured data since then.