# Ovais Tariq

> Ovais Tariq is the co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data, a globally distributed, S3-compatible object storage company. A Karachi-born infrastructure engineer who previously worked at Percona, Lithium, and Uber, he co-founded Tigris with fellow Uber storage engineers Himank Chaudhary and Yevgeniy Firsov. His work centers on reducing operational complexity for developers and making data accessible across compute providers.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Tigris Data
- **Organizations:** Tigris Data, Uber, Percona, Lithium
- **From:** Karachi, Pakistan
- **Nationality:** Pakistani American
- **Education:** Computer science studies; exact degree not verified, University of Karachi
- **Known for:** Led storage work at Uber, including managed database, blob storage, and caching services for internal developers., Worked on bringing Uber’s distributed document database into production., Co-founded Tigris Data with fellow Uber storage engineers.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Published technical writing about Percona XtraDB Cluster on his personal blog.
- **2014** — Published posts about MySQL replication upgrade bugs and BLOB corruption.
- **2016** — Presented on monitoring MySQL at scale at Percona Live; shared the slides on his blog.
- **2021** — Discussed Uber’s Docstore with Himank Chaudhary on the Percona podcast while leading storage engineering at Uber.
- **2021-11** — Co-founded Tigris Data with Himank Chaudhary and Yevgeniy Firsov.
- **2022** — Publicly introduced Tigris as an open-source real-time data platform and wrote about its use of FoundationDB.
- **2024-02** — Tigris launched a globally available S3-compatible object storage service alongside a16z’s investment announcement.
- **2025-10** — Announced Tigris’s $25 million Series A led by Spark Capital.

## Achievements

- Led storage work at Uber, including managed database, blob storage, and caching services for internal developers.
- Worked on bringing Uber’s distributed document database into production.
- Co-founded Tigris Data with fellow Uber storage engineers.
- Led Tigris through a $25 million Series A announced in October 2025.
- Published practical technical writing on MySQL, monitoring, infrastructure, and FoundationDB.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Clarified publicly that FoundationDB continued to hold Tigris metadata and replication commits while asynchronous task processing moved to Kafka; the engineering account was published September 22.
- **2026-08** — Co-founder Himank Chaudhary published a detailed account of the FoundationDB-based architecture behind Tigris’s global object store.
- **2026-06** — Tigris engineer Xe Iaso published objgit, an experimental Git server backed by Tigris object storage; credit belongs to Iaso.
- **2026-01** — In a Business Recorder interview, advocated sustained investment in Pakistan’s AI infrastructure and reliable energy.
- **2025-11** — Discussed operating independent storage infrastructure with Martin Casado on the AI + a16z podcast.

## Links

- Website: https://www.ovaistariq.net/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ovaistariq
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ovaistariq
- GitHub: https://github.com/ovaistariq

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/ovais-tariq
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-22