Dean Hildebrand is a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Google. He leverages his deep expertise in scalable storage systems to build relationships with the leadership of the most strategic customers to support specialized technology requirements and strategic initiatives. He has authored many scientific publications, published over 40 patents, and been the technical program chair and sat on the program committee of numerous conferences.

Previously, Dean was a Principal Research Staff Member, Master Inventor, and member of the IBM Academy of Technology at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research focused on parallel file systems and object stores in both HPC and enterprise data centers. Dean was part of the GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale) leadership team and focused on combing traditional scalable data access with cloud architectures such as OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Dean pioneered pNFS, demonstrating the feasibility of providing standard and scalable access to any file system. He received a B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and M.S. and PhD. degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2003 and 2007, respectively.