Backblaze, Inc. announced that Dr. Brian Beach has been named Chief Technology Officer (CTO), effective November 7, 2022. Brian Wilson, who has served as CTO since 2007, will remain an employee at Backblaze and will become Inveterate Software Engineer, as well as serve in an advisory CTO capacity until the end of the year. Beach has been with Backblaze for more than nine years and serves as Distinguished Engineer.

A deep history with the company, Beach was the first customer in 2008. Over the course of his tenure, he has played a critical role in initiatives such as building next-generation distributed storage solutions, implementing the B2 Cloud Storage service, and reporting on disk drive performance and reliability. Most recently, Beach has expanded his role to include overall system architecture.

Brian Beach brings over 40 years of engineering experience to his new role as CTO. Prior to Backblaze, Brian worked as the Vice President and Principal Engineer for TiVo where he was instrumental in building the world's first Digital Video Recorder (DVR). He has also held senior engineering positions at Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Information Science, and his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of California, Santa Cruz.