Behnam joined Zadara in April 2022 and currently serves as CTO for the APAC & SEMEA regions. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Behnam is a highly innovative technologist who has built his career at the intersection of deep engineering and leadership. He has contributed extensively both as a hands-on individual contributor and as a people manager, leading and mentoring cross-functional, geographically distributed teams across R&D and technical product marketing. Having worked in both Israel and the United States, Behnam brings a global perspective to technology leadership, combining deep engineering culture with customer-driven, enterprise-scale delivery. Throughout most of his career, Behnam has been a core developer, with strong expertise in C language development, designing and implementing high-performance firmware and software. His technical background spans advanced storage technologies including NOR, NAND, SSD, All-Flash Arrays (AFA), Intel Optane, and Software-Defined Storage (SDS), supporting block, file, and object storage across both on-premises and cloud deployments. Behnam’s career includes senior roles at technology companies such as Intel, Micron, and Western Digital, as well as innovative startups including Excelero, which was acquired by NVIDIA in 2021. As part of Excelero and later through continued work with NVIDIA-related AI initiatives, Behnam has been actively involved in AI-driven infrastructure and accelerated computing for AI, including customer-facing deployments and platform architecture. His areas of expertise include storage systems (FTL, SSD, firmware and full-stack software development), virtualization, cloud computing, networking, distributed systems, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for AI. Behnam is also an inventor and thought leader, holding a patent for SSD-protected anti-evasion ransomware detection, and authoring dozens of technical blogs and white papers.