We’ve searched far and wide for the most extraordinary talent in the industry… and I’m thrilled to introduce five new Aardvark team members.  These are the best of the best, of the (literally) thousands of candidates we evaluated in the last few months.

Sameer Paranjpye, Lepidopterist (his Zoo title, since we call our office the Mechanical Zoo), founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project.  Prior to that, he was the Engineering Manager for Yahoo’s search’s Indexing team.  Sameer also spent a few years (starting as the sole developer) working on web cartography for Inktomi’s search engine.  He holds a BS in Computer Science from IIT, Roorkee and a Masters in CS from UIUC.  Sameer’s favorite Aardvark experience: “getting advice from four friends-of-friends to my question about whether or not to bring a car seat on a flight to India for my newborn son.  The consensus from the many thoughtful responders was No”.

Sacha Arnoud, Herpatologist, led the backend engineering group at Conviva and built the company’s distributed data-mining framework (responsible for processing 100ks messages per second).   Prior, Sacha was Chief Architect for Sun Microsystems Storage and Software divisions where he co-invented and led the launch of a new innovative storage product line.  He has Masters degrees in engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique and Telecom ParisTech in Paris.  Sacha recounted, “my lemon tree was dying and I asked Aardvark how I should be watering it.  A very knowledgeable gardener in Mexico set me right — now my lemon tree is flowering.  It turns out you can water the tree too much and actually damage the roots.”  

Priyank Chodisetti, Avian Phrenologist, was CTO of Give and Take Inc. before joining Aardvark.  Prior, Priyank worked on MSN for Microsoft and was a Research Engineer at Stanford’s Department of Neurobiology.  He has a Master’s in CS from Stanford and a Bachelor’s in CS and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India.  Priyank says, “most commonly, I ask Aardvark for restaurants around the Bay area.  My most memorable recommended meal at Chez Panisse was the consensus from two people in my network and an amazing place.”

Qun Cao, Panda Playmate, was a Software Engineer at Yahoo where she worked on the company’s AdServer team.  Prior, Qun was a programmer for The Institute of Creative Technologies at USC.  She has Master’s in CS from USC as well as a Masters in Physics from UIUC and a Bachelor’s in Physics from Peking University in Beijing.  Qun’s best Aardvark experience: “I asked how to get better depth of field with a digital camera and got four answers within minutes.  I ended up having a long back and forth with an acquaintance I had no idea knew so much about SLRs.”

Alison Johnston, Purchaser of Exotic Animals, is the new community manager at Aardvark.  She was previously on the marketing team at Box.net, and just graduated from Stanford.  Aardvark users can expect to hear from her often.  Alison is looking forward to moving to the city — “now I can stop asking Aardvark for commuting tips, like “What’s a shortcut to get from Palo Alto to SOMA at 9 in the morning? :-)”

I’m extremely excited to start working with these folks.  (And we’re still searching!  Check out our job postings.)