GridGain Systems Leadership

Eoin O’Connor serves as GridGain’s president and CEO and is leading the company’s efforts to drive continued rapid growth, broaden the customer base, and enhance its distributed in-memory computing product offerings. Eoin joined GridGain in 2016 as chief financial officer and was appointed to his current position in 2022. In his previous roles at GridGain, he was responsible for finance & accounting, sales operations, legal, human resources, corporate compliance and IT.

Prior to joining GridGain, Eoin was an executive at a number of public companies, including Oracle and Siebel. He began his career at KPMG, specializing in initial public offerings and audits of hi-tech public companies. He then spent many years in leadership roles across both finance and operations. More recently, at ON24 and Space Time Insight, he was instrumental in managing fast revenue growth in a very short time span. Eoin has facilitated multiple venture capital funding transactions for GridGain and other growth-stage companies.

Eoin holds a Bachelor of Commerce from University College Cork, Ireland, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He is an avid golfer and enjoys attending concerts.

Lalit Ahuja is responsible for ensuring customers gain the most value from their GridGain investments. He oversees delivery of vertically-aligned solutions in collaboration with GridGain’s strategic partners and leads a global team of solution architects focused on customer success.

In his career spanning over 20 years, Lalit has led various IT functions including enterprise architecture, product management, large scale program management, IT operations and served as a digital strategy advisor to executives at Fortune 500 enterprises.

Prior to GridGain, Lalit led the global Customer Success team at Akana, a leader in API Management and Application Services Governance space, where he was responsible for increased customer retention and more than 300% growth in Akana’s consulting services business.

Lalit holds a Master’s degree in Engineering and an MBA from UCLA.

Katherine Rincon has more than 25 years of technology marketing experience as an executive and manager, and is passionate about real-time data and infrastructure software. Prior to joining GridGain, she served as the CMO at Unit21, a Gradient Ventures- backed startup redefining how risk and compliance teams fight financial crime.

Before Unit21, she held executive management roles at Rapyd, a fintech startup focused on cross-border transactions; Striim, a streaming data integration and intelligence platform for real-time operations and decisioning; and PubNub, a developer API platform that powers the real-time infrastructure in apps. She also held executive management positions at SL Corporation, Embarcadero Technologies, and WebLogic / BEA Systems, and senior management roles at NetDynamics and Visa.

Rincon has Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Quantitative Economics and French Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. She enjoys travel, swimming, rowing, American football, and Formula 1.

Andy Sacks returns to GridGain as Chief Revenue Officer to lead GridGain’s global revenue strategy. With over 20 years of enterprise sales experience, Andy brings deep expertise in developing robust direct and indirect routes to market across both pre- and post-sales organizations.

Prior to his return to GridGain, Andy spent several years as an Executive Vice President of Sales at Alloy Technologies, Imply Data, and early-stage GridGain. At each company, he developed and led the company’s global Sales organization while posting triple digit growth year-over-year. At both Imply and early-stage GridGain, he built the sales organizations from scratch. In his early career, he spent over 8 years at Red Hat where he joined as part of the JBoss acquisition. There he developed and led strategic sales teams while delivering substantial revenue to the company. He also held sales leadership roles at Bluestone Software (acquired by HP), RightWorks (acquired by i2), and Inktomi (acquired by Yahoo! and Verity) where he was instrumental in developing the company’s Partner Sales organization.

Andy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from California State University, Sacramento, where he played on the school’s lacrosse team. He enjoys spending weekends with his wife and two daughters.

Elena Schtein is GridGain’s Chief Financial Officer managing all financial actions of the company including annual audits, reporting, M&A, fundraising due diligence, revenue recognition, forecasting, general ledger, consolidations, cash management, risk management, US and international taxes and equity. She is credited with building the company’s finance infrastructure from the ground up, including team recruitment and operational processes. Most recently, she and her team played an instrumental role in facilitating multiple venture capital funding transactions for GridGain.

Elena thrives in fast-paced environments working with early- to mid-stage companies in need of financial processes, corporate infrastructure, and KPIs for growth. Elena’s career spans more than 25 years, working in both privately held and publicly traded companies focused on enterprise software, SaaS, and other banking technology. Before joining GridGain Systems, she served as Corporate Controller for both SpaceTime Insight and Porter Novelli, and as Director of Revenue for ON24.

Elena holds a BS Degree in Accounting with a Minor in Statistics from the State University of Economics and Finance in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She’s a dog-lover, who admits to spoiling her Standard Poodle, Alby.

Yuri Yudin leads the engineering, architecture, and quality assurance teams at GridGain. He has over 25 years of experience in software development, design, and architecture at various large enterprises and startups. He specializes in distributed systems, data analytics, security, networking and performance tuning.

Prior to GridGain, Yury was Director of Engineering at WANdisco where he led development and testing of their Big Data and ALM product lines. Before WANdisco, Yury spent 10 years at Intel managing cross-site engineering teams in the development and performance tuning of managed runtime environments on a wide range of Intel platforms. Prior to Intel, Yury held various engineering and management positions at Sun Microsystems, HyCube, Tepkom, Transas Marine and others.

Yury holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the Saint Petersburg State University, Russia where, for a number of years, he also gave lectures on Informatics, programming languages, and modern computer architectures.

Michelle Costa leads GridGain’s Human Resources efforts. With over 18 years of experience in all aspects of Human Resources including sourcing, staffing, compliance, compensation, employee relations, and benefits, Michelle has a proven record of managing company growth, developing business partnerships, and implementing management best practices.

Her progressive roles in HR have given her the opportunity to drive impact in many different work environments, including smaller start-up organizations as well as large international corporations. Before joining GridGain Michelle held roles in HR in the FinTech and Data Management industries which gave her the opportunity to drive impact in many different work environments, most favorably small to mid-size, start-up organizations.

Michelle holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Chico State University.

Kirill Petrov is responsible for operational support for the GridGain engineers in EMEA. He oversees infrastructure, compliance, and a wide range of operations-related activities to ensure stable and continuous growth and business continuity. Kirill leads the company’s regional transformations and internal improvement/optimization initiatives. Prior to this current role, he also held positions as GridGain’s Director of Development and Key Projects Director over his 4+ years with the company.

Kirill has close to 20 years’ experience in the industry with various roles in fintech and telecom companies in the areas of Delivery Management for large-scale distributed teams – up to hundreds of people – as well as Account Management in large companies, product and service providers.

He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Baltic State Technical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Mark Mszanski has more than 25 years of executive management experience in sales and operations at both startups and large-scale software companies. Mark specializes in recruiting, developing and leading geographically dispersed sales teams and developing highly effective go-to-market strategies.

Prior to GridGain Systems, he was Vice President of Sales Financial Services and Eastern Region at Akana Software Inc., a leader in the API Management and Application Services Governance space that was purchased by Rogue Wave Software. At Akana, Mark transformed the sales organization for growth and quota attainment, securing Fortune 500 accounts.

Before Akana, Mark was Vice President of Financial Services for Kony America’s Solutions Inc., where he built and managed a team focused on Financial Services in the U.S and Latin America. His sales team accounted for 50 percent of Kony’s total revenue. Prior to Kony, Mark held executive management positions at Evolven Software, Hewlett Packard Company, DataSynapse, BEA Systems, and more.

Mark holds a BS degree in Business from Springfield College.

Timothy Carley joined GridGain in 2018. As Managing Director for EMEA, he is responsible for running operations and driving revenue and growth for the region.

Timothy has more than 25 years of management and senior sales executive experience in FinTechs and Infrastructure software, within sectors such as Investment Banking, Insurance, Energy and Logistics. He has been involved in launching and running sales operations in EMEA for cutting-edge start-ups and large-scale global companies.

Prior to GridGain Systems, Timothy was Managing Director, EMEA at Numerix, a leader in pricing and risk management systems. Before Numerix, he held management positions at Wolters Kluwer and DataSynapse, and senior sales roles at Calypso, Sungard, and Reuters.

Timothy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business & Administration from ESSEC Business School in Cergy, France.