Apollo GraphQL Welcomes Smruti Patel to Company’s Leadership Team

Patel previously led the Data Platform engineering organization at Stripe; brings more than 15 years of engineering leadership, vision to Apollo

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Apollo GraphQL, the supergraph company, announced that it has expanded its leadership team, welcoming Smruti Patel as Vice President of engineering. Patel brings more than 15 years of engineering leadership experience to Apollo, having previously led infrastructure teams at Stripe and VMWare.

“We’re so excited to have Smruti on board,” said Matt DeBergalis, Apollo co-founder and CTO. “Apollo's entire mission revolves around delivering world-class developer experiences, whether that’s through our products, or as part of our team. Adding a leader of Smruti’s caliber shows that we’ve been successful in doing that so far, and that we’re investing in getting even better as we grow.”

Patel joined Stripe in early 2018, leading a cloud efficiency team, to optimize their overall infrastructure spend. She envisioned a “shift left” engineering culture to design highly performant and efficient Stripe products with economies of scale, and built the Latency, Efficiency, Attribution and Performance group. She moved on to lead the Data Platform engineering organization which hosts the underlying big data, async and stream processing infrastructure for Stripe’s mission-critical business, while ensuring its security, compliance, reliability, and efficiency.

Under Patel’s leadership, the Data Platform brought dozens of discrete products under its umbrella and scaled the team from 30 people to nearly 180. The Data Platform organization now also maintains Stripe’s public search API, operates key internal data solutions, and supports core data quality tooling and abstractions. Before Stripe, Patel spent 11 years at VMWare building the company's enterprise disaster recovery solution, and led a cloud-based data protection initiative.

“I’m excited to work with a phenomenal set of people across all disciplines at Apollo on a mission that deeply resonates with me,” said Patel. “After being in tech for two decades, it all comes down to people. Apollo is filled with great people who are consistently focused on its values of stewardship, caring, and a constant growth mindset. When the opportunity to build great things with this team arose, I couldn't pass it up. Apollo has incredible opportunities in the app development space, and I can't wait to help realize the company's mission to help developers help the world.”

About Apollo GraphQL

Apollo GraphQL, the supergraph company, is the leader in open source and commercial GraphQL technologies. Apollo helps engineering teams build supergraphs that accelerate application development and deliver better, more cohesive experiences. Apollo's open-source GraphQL client, server, and gateway are downloaded more than 17M times per month and used in production by over 30 percent of the Fortune 500. Customers like Walmart, Expedia, Glassdoor, Audi, and PayPal, use the Apollo Graph Platform to unify their GraphQL efforts, collaborate on graph development, and safely iterate on their graphs. Based in San Francisco, Apollo is backed by Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures. Learn more at: https://www.apollographql.com.