He was the first committer added to Hadoop and was the original chair of the Hadoop Project Management Committee. Owen was the technology lead for both MapReduce and the project to add security to Hadoop. In 2009, he optimized Hadoop to set the record for the Terasort, Gray Sort, and Minute Sort benchmarks. In July 2011, he helped co-found Hortonworks, which is accelerating development and adoption of Hadoop for the enterprise. Before working on Hadoop, he worked on Yahoo Search'sWebMap project, which builds a graph of the known web and applies many heuristics to the entire graph that control search. Prior to Yahoo, he wandered between testing, static analysis, distributed configuration management, and software model checking. He received his PhD in Software Engineering from University of California, Irvine.