Joe Xavier

[overview]

Joe is a seasoned technology executive and innovator with deep expertise in incubating and scaling products, building high-performing engineering teams from the ground up, and driving technical innovation across both startups and large-scale enterprises.  

Most recently, as CTO at Grammarly, Joe led Engineering, Applied AI Research, Security, Compliance, and Data Science. Joining in 2018, he scaled the team from 35 to 450 globally and spearheaded Grammarly’s transition from rule-based NLP to deep learning and LLMs, while developing scalable ML Ops infrastructure. This modernization enabled Grammarly to serve 50M+ WAUs with low latency and cost efficiency. He also expanded the company’s product portfolio—including desktop applications leveraging accessibility APIs on macOS and Windows—and led its evolution from a consumer product into an enterprise-grade platform, driving nearly 10x revenue growth and achieving positive free cash flow.

Previously, as VP of Engineering at Mixpanel, Joe scaled the team from 14 to 80, led the migration from IBM Cloud to Google Cloud, and transitioned Mixpanel’s database from a row-store to a columnar architecture. At Twitter, he directed infrastructure for the Home timeline, and at Amazon, he managed engineering teams responsible for product recommendations. He began his career at Microsoft, where he played a key role in incubating what became SQL Azure, a scalable cloud-based database service.

Joe holds an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in ECE from PSG College of Technology. He also pursued an MS in Computer Science at the University of Washington while at Microsoft.

[Q&A]