The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Grant Ingersoll as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Grant brings two decades of experience in open source software development and natural language processing engineering to the Foundation. He will join the Foundation on 23 September.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Together, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are visited by around 1.5 billion unique devices every month. The Wikimedia Foundation is driven by its vision of building a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
“Grant joins us with a passion for invention, innovation, and a lengthy career in open source that aligns with our values,” said Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “His background and expertise will help Wikimedia advance our investment in the platforms that power the Wikimedia projects and ensure our preparation for the future.”
As Chief Technology Officer, Grant will lead the development and execution of the technical platform strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia projects. He will lead a diverse and global department of researchers, engineers, security and machine learning experts, analysts, and more to evolve and scale Wikimedia’s platforms and infrastructure.
“I’m incredibly excited to join the Wikimedia Foundation as CTO at a time when providing everyone with open, free, trusted knowledge has never been more important,” Grant said. “Having led teams toward delivering solutions that help people access and use information, I can think of no better place to amplify that mission working with a talented group. I look forward to the technical opportunities and challenges that come with the role, as well as the chance to be a part of a dedicated and vibrant global community.”
Prior to joining Wikimedia, Grant was the CTO and co-founder of Lucidworks, a company delivering AI-powered search solutions for organizations built on open-source software, Apache Lucene and Apache Solr. Grant is still a contributing member of the broader Lucene community of developers. He is one of the original contributors to Lucene and Solr, a co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project, and a long standing member of the Apache Software Foundation. Grant also worked at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University in natural language processing and information retrieval.
He earned his bachelor of science from Amherst College in math and computer science and his master’s in computer science from Syracuse University. Grant is also the lead author of Taming Text from Manning Publications. He is based in North Carolina.
