Basking Ridge, NJ, USA

Hee Won Lee is a cloud systems expert with over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and optimizing distributed systems across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

He was a Principal Engineer at Samsung Electronics (2020–2024), where he led a team of over 50 engineers developing and operating compute, storage, and network infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and on-premises datacenters–-driving large-scale automation, telemetry, and intelligent platform services. Prior to that, he served as a Principal Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs Research (2015–2020), where he developed resilient, cost-efficient storage and compute systems for carrier-grade networks. Earlier in his career, he worked as a software engineer at Korea Telecom from 2002 to 2009.

He holds a B.E. in Electrial Engineering from Korea University (2002), an M.E. in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University (2015).

His areas of expertise include system-level virtualization (QEMU-KVM), Kubernetes-based infrastructure, Ceph storage, networking, performance engineering, and distributed systems.