Ali Ayoub (38), Senior Director of Software Engineering at Nvidia, co-founder of delivery startup HAAT
Personal: Married + 2, lives in Carmiel
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from the Technion with honors, MBA from the Open University
Previous positions: Software Architect at Mellanox, Senior Software Engineer at Google
Ali Ayoub (38) has always been a little bit ahead of everyone else. He was the smartest boy in his class and at his school. He started computer science studies at the Technion at the age of 17 – despite parental entreaties that he should choose a respectable profession, as they saw it, such as medicine or law. At age 19, he started working at Mellanox, and from there he moved to the just-emerging Google Cloud, Google’s successful cloud product that competes against Microsoft and Amazon.
Now, Ayoub is a senior director of software engineering at Nvidia (after it acquired Mellanox, making it a kind of comeback for him). The graphic processing units (GPU) he helps develop are installed in server farms at the biggest multinational tech giants, accelerating the shift to cloud computing happening at more and more enterprises and organizations.
From his office in Yokneam, he manages 60 software engineers who help make every operation smarter. “Whenever you run a search on Google or browse a social network, you’re operating a computer that’s much faster than your home computer, located far away on a large server farm,” he explains. “This computer requires a processing unit and software that will provide faster and better performance.” The GPU whose software Ayoub is charged with developing – which is also installed in autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, and game consoles – has added layers of artificial intelligence and acceleration, enabling it to meet ever-increasing user demand.
“When I interview them in their own language, things go differently”
Ayoub grew up in the town of Majd al-Krum, son of a teacher father and a housewife mother. He is the fourth of five brothers and sisters, and is not the only one in the tech industry. Older brother Hatim works for Intel, and younger brother Hani is a senior engineer at Amazon. Both were recognized in elementary school as having exceptional math skills.
Ali was also a child with an unusual interest in technology. “I was the kid that the school lab technician would call every time a computer broke down and he needed help. At the age of seven, I found myself playing with the operating system settings and deliberately breaking the computer. The first time it happened, I was stressed out, but then I learned how to wipe the computer and reinstall everything, and that way I got to know computers better. In retrospect, we engineers call this skill reverse engineering – an extremely important ability in cyber development and artificial intelligence – which enables you to think about the way a product was developed.”
He began his career in 2001, immediately after the dot-com bubble burst. “High-tech was not as attractive at that time as it is today,” he says. “And I had to first convince the people closest to me that this was what I wanted to do, and that this was the field I felt drawn to. At first, my parents suggested that I should study medicine or law, but in the end, my family was very supportive.”
At age 17, Ayoub was accepted to the software engineering track at the Faculty of Computer Science at …….