James Kretchmar is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai. In this role, he oversees the architecture and technology strategy of Akamai’s globally distributed edge and cloud platform. His responsibilities include company-wide direction for core platform technologies, reliability and safety governance, architectural oversight of new products and services, management of industry trends and standards bodies, and technical innovation with key partners and customers.
Kretchmar joined Akamai in 2004. Previously, he served in a variety of technical leadership roles across the company in both engineering and operations, including as Chair of Akamai’s Architecture Board, CTO of EMEA, and lead architect of Akamai’s global traffic management and load balancing system, which directs billions of internet users to hundreds of thousands of servers based on real-time conditions.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also worked as a network engineer and systems programmer prior to joining Akamai. Kretchmar is a published author on the topic of network administration, serves on the board of directors of the Akamai Foundation, and is a winner of the Danny Lewin Award, the highest award granted by Akamai to its employees.