# Nong Li

> Nong Li is a San Francisco-based engineer, an original author of Apache Parquet, and the co-founder and former CTO and CEO of Okera. His work spans Cloudera’s Impala execution engine, Spark performance engineering at Databricks, and data authorization at Okera. Databricks announced its agreement to acquire Okera in May 2023; Li returned to Databricks and co-authored its June 2026 Lakehouse//RT announcement.

- **Role:** Engineer at Databricks
- **Organizations:** Databricks, Okera, Cloudera, Microsoft, Apache Parquet
- **Education:** Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Brown University
- **Known for:** One of the original authors of Apache Parquet., Technical leadership on Cloudera’s Impala core execution engine and Record Service., Led vectorized Parquet and code-generation efforts at Databricks; Databricks credits those efforts as contributing to Spark 2.0’s reported 10x performance improvement.

## Career timeline

- **2004–2008** — Studied computer science at Brown University.
- **Before Cloudera; dates unverified** — Worked in engineering at Microsoft.
- **2013** — Named among the engineers introducing Parquet, a joint Twitter and Cloudera project; contributed to its format specification.
- **Before 2016; dates unverified** — Technical lead for Impala’s core execution engine and Record Service at Cloudera; subsequently led Spark core and SparkSQL performance engineering at Databricks.
- **2016** — Co-founded the company later known as Okera with Amandeep Khurana; initially served as CTO.
- **2019** — Identified as Okera CEO in reporting on the launch of Okera Spotlight.
- **2020** — Moved from CEO to CTO as Nick Halsey became CEO.
- **2022-03** — Okera announced Li’s elevation to CEO, retaining the CTO role, alongside Bobby Napiltonia’s appointment as president.
- **2023-05** — Databricks announced a definitive agreement to acquire Okera; Li publicly welcomed his return to Databricks.
- **2026-06** — Co-authored Databricks’ introduction of Lakehouse//RT.

## Achievements

- One of the original authors of Apache Parquet.
- Technical leadership on Cloudera’s Impala core execution engine and Record Service.
- Led vectorized Parquet and code-generation efforts at Databricks; Databricks credits those efforts as contributing to Spark 2.0’s reported 10x performance improvement.
- Co-founded Okera in 2016 and led it in CTO and CEO roles before the Databricks acquisition announcement in 2023.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Listed as a co-author of Databricks’ Lakehouse//RT introduction, published June 16, 2026.
- **2023-05** — Welcomed the Okera acquisition announcement and his return to Databricks in a public LinkedIn post.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nongl/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/nongli

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/nong-li
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-23