# Qian Li

> Qian Li is the co-founder and CEO of DBOS, Inc., a Cambridge- and San Francisco-based company turning a once-academic idea into infrastructure: store a program's execution state inside Postgres so crashed apps and AI agents resume exactly where they left off. A Stanford computer science PhD, she co-founded DBOS in 2023 out of a joint Stanford-MIT research project led by Postgres creator Mike Stonebraker and Spark co-creator Matei Zaharia. She was named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2025, won a USENIX ATC Best Paper award for INFaaS, and is a regular voice on systems podcasts and conference stages on durable, observable, scalable software.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at DBOS, Inc.
- **Organizations:** DBOS, Inc., Stanford University, Peking University
- **Nationality:** Chinese
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University, M.S. in Computer Science, Stanford University, B.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology, Peking University
- **Known for:** Co-founded DBOS, Inc. as CEO, commercializing durable execution on Postgres., Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40, Class of 2025., USENIX ATC Best Paper Award (2021) for INFaaS.

## Career timeline

- **2017** — Graduated from Peking University with a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology, then began graduate study at Stanford.
- **2019** — Earned M.S. in Computer Science at Stanford University.
- **2020** — Joined the DBOS academic research project, a Stanford-MIT collaboration led by Mike Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia.
- **2021** — Won USENIX ATC Best Paper Award for INFaaS, a model-less inference serving system.
- **2023** — Completed Ph.D. at Stanford (advised by Christos Kozyrakis) and co-founded DBOS, Inc.
- **2024** — DBOS launched Transact for Python and raised seed funding ($8.5M total).
- **2025** — Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40; spoke at QCon San Francisco and on SE Radio.

## Achievements

- Co-founded DBOS, Inc. as CEO, commercializing durable execution on Postgres.
- Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40, Class of 2025.
- USENIX ATC Best Paper Award (2021) for INFaaS.
- Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship (2017).
- Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship (2019).
- National Scholarship, China (2016).
- Published at VLDB, CIDR, and Communications of the ACM.
- Featured on SE Radio, InfoQ, Stack Overflow Podcast, and Spotify's Infra Pod.

## Latest updates

- **2025-11** — Spoke at QCon San Francisco on compiling workflows into databases.
- **2025-08** — Featured on SE Radio episode 681 discussing DBOS durable execution and serverless computing.
- **2025-07** — Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40, Class of 2025.

## Links

- Website: https://qianli.dev/
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/qianli-dev
- GitHub: https://github.com/qianl15
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/qianli.dev

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/qian-li
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21