Jim Roskind, PhD

1978 Hertz Fellow
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Jim Roskind is the vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon, joining the company in 2016.

The bulk of Jim’s work there has focused on improving computational efficiency, eCommerce availability, and application latency. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Google for eight years, where he designed the QUIC protocol, and lead its implementation in Chrome, which has evolved into the recently approved IETF Standard HTTP/3. He was also more generally focused on helping to make Chrome go faster by designing and implementing a client-side metrics system, speculative DNS pre-resolution, speculative TCP pre-connection, Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP (SDCH), and an always-on internal profiler. Before leaving Google, he also spent a year on Machine Learning research.

Going back in time, Jim worked at Netscape, also for 8 years, where he designed/deployed a Java Security model with Signed Java, as well as helping design SSL 2.0 and serving as the Java Security Architect, where he “fixed bugs published in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal,” among other things. Prior to the Internet revolution in 1994, he co-founded Infoseek and wrote the Python profiler that is still available today. For the 10 years before Infoseek, he was a freelance software contractor, working at too many companies to list. One compiler job motivated him to write an open-source YACCable C++ grammar, and then to become the head the Formal Syntax Working Group for ANSI C++. Before that, he did super-VLSI design and GaAs design at Harris GISD in Florida.

Jim also reports having spent many years in school, earning an SB EE and SB CS at MIT, followed by Hertz Foundation support in earning an SM EECS and an EECS PhD from MIT in the area of data communications networks, supervised by Robert G. Gallager. In the course of his work, he’s also been awarded over 190 US patents.

Jim was raised in the South Bronx, where, through diligent work by criminals, his neighbors eventually beat out the infamous (and movie titled) “Fort Apache,” to become the highest crime precinct in New York City. His less obvious hobbies reportedly include genealogy, sleight of hand card magic, juggling, refereeing soccer, working out, etc. Far less current pastimes included making NASDAQ brokers more honest, scuba diving, springboard diving, gymnastics, motorcycle riding (and teaching), unicycling, lock picking, flying planes, jumping out of perfectly good planes via parachute, judo, jiu-jitsu, and tae-kwon-do.

"My clout in college probably connected me to the people that co-founded Infoseek. Folks that knew me, knew what I did. But folks that didn't know me, understood what my fellowship award meant."
– James Roskind

Graduate Studies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Computer Science
Edge Disjoint Spanning Trees and Failure Recovery in Data Communication Networks

Undergraduate Studies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology