Software Experts for a Distributed Grid
Founded in 2019, our team at Camus Energy combines deep experience designing and operating distributed systems at Google, SpaceX and Uber with a passion for combating climate change.
We are here to help electric utilities and energy providers make the transition to a clean energy future. And we are committed to having fun while doing so – Our mascot is the capybara, and our official utensil is the spork.
Our Leaders
Astrid Atkinson
CEO
Astrid Atkinson | CEO/Co-Founder
Astrid Atkinson is CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy, which provides software-based Grid Management as a Service, combining real-time situational awareness, device control, and markets and pricing to support the transition to a Distribution System Operator model.
Prior to founding Camus, she was a Senior Director of Software Engineering at Google, where she was an early leader in distributed systems reliability. As lead for reliability engineering for Google.com, she led the development of Google’s global web serving platform, and as head of Frameworks Engineering, she led the transformation of all Google products to standardize on common, performant, scalable infrastructure for servers, microservices, mobile apps, and experimentation – to help all teams at Google operate reliably at global scale. She speaks globally as an expert on large scale distributed systems architecture, reliability engineering, and organizational leadership.
Cody Smith
CTO
Cody Smith | CTO/Co-Founder
Cody Smith (he/him) is CTO and co-founder of Camus Energy. He is a technical leader specializing in large computing applications — particularly in areas of reliability, monitoring, cyber security, and efficiency.
At Google, he served in multiple technical leadership roles, including as enterprise-wide architect and strategist for Site Reliability Engineering and production lead for Google Search. He co-authored Google’s large-scale monitoring platform, network load balancer, and RPC security infrastructure. On a special assignment, he served as operations leader for the HealthCare.gov “Tech Surge” rescue crew working for Todd Park, US CTO. He received a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Ryan
COO
Michael Ryan | COO
Michael Ryan is the COO and co-founder of Camus Energy. He has over 20 years of experience in software development, service delivery, business operations and executive leadership in the areas of data integration, business process management, Web, IOT and industrial data management. He has delivered key strategies, products, and programs for Xerox, NetApp, BD Biosciences, WellPoint, 2lemetry, GE, and Sony Biotechnology. He has received his degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, has been certified as a Stanford Advanced Project Manager, and has completed an MBA at Santa Clara University.
Ted James
Head of Strategy
Ted James | VP Strategy
Ted James is Head of Strategy at Camus. He is an expert in clean energy adoption, distributed resources, policy/regulatory contexts, and go-to-market strategies.
Prior to Camus, Ted was a Principal at PG&E where he focused on utility decarbonization and business strategies, as well as customer solutions. He also served 6 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), including as a Team Lead in the lab’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center. He received a BA, Environmental Science at Washington University in St. Louis and an MBA from the University of Colorado – Leeds School of Business.
Raj Raheja
CBO
Raj Raheja | Chief Business Officer
Raj Raheja is Chief Business Officer at Camus. He is an expert in data driven insight in the world of finance and fintech. Most recently, Raj led a team of quantitative risk and data scientist professionals at Citadel LLC, a multi-strategy hedge fund that brings together the art of fundamental investing with cutting edge technology to help its capital partners achieve their financial goals.
Prior to that, Raj led product management at MSCI Barra, a fintech firm providing risk analytics and investment decision making software to the top asset managers, hedge funds, pension plans, and sovereign wealth funds around the world. He has received a BS, Business Administration at Carnegie Mellon University and a Master in Financial Engineering from the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley.
Our Team Members
Doug Cutting
Advisor
Doug Cutting |.Advisor
Doug is an open-source software developer. He launched several successful projects at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), including Lucene, Hadoop and Avro.
He is currently Chief Architect at Cloudera and in the past has served on the board of the ASF and worked at Yahoo!, Excite, Apple and Xerox PARC. Doug has a degree in Linguistics from Stanford University. Doug likes hiking, backpacking and especially mountain biking. He volunteers locally to create new trails and coach the youth mountain bike team. His wife and three sons share these passions and can often be found together enjoying the outdoors.
Varun Sivaram
Advisor
Varun Sivaram | Advisor
Dr. Varun Sivaram is a physicist, bestselling author, and clean energy technology expert with experience spanning the corporate, policy, and academic sectors—most recently as Chief Technology Officer of ReNew Power, a multibillion-dollar renewable energy firm that is India’s largest. He is currently a visiting senior fellow at the Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy.
His previous roles include director of the energy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, senior energy advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor, professor at Georgetown University, and consultant at McKinsey & Co. He serves on the boards of the Stanford University energy and environment institutes; as senior fellow at the Aspen Institute and Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; as one of 25 global advisors to the UN COP26 global climate summit and on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Energy Transition; and on the board of directors of Peridot Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: PDAC), the advisory board of Glint Solar, and as senior advisor to Camus Energy and Radia, Inc. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world. His books include “Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet,” “Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission,” and “Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems.” A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.
Armando Atienza
Software Engineer
Armando Atienza | Engineer
Armando Atienza is an engineer at Camus who has expertise and experience through the entire engineering stack from hardware to large scale computational systems.
At Google he wrote the enterprise infrastructure monitoring platform and worked in the self-driving cars program. He built systems monitoring for SpaceX and then oversaw infrastructure and security for member companies at Playground. He served as an engineer on HealthCare.gov as part of the “Tech Surge” rescue crew. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Daniel Chen
Software Engineer
Daniel Chen | Sorftware Engineer
Daniel Chen is a software engineer at Camus with over a decade of experience in infrastructure engineering, with a focus on traffic control, database management, and observability. Prior to Camus, he served as an early member of the infrastructure engineering team at Uber and founded the Software Networking team, scaling an infrastructure platform from less than a hundred physical servers to over a hundred thousand hybrid on-premise and distributed cloud instances. Daniel has received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley.
James Duncan
Software Engineer
James Duncan | Software Engineer
James Duncan is an engineer at Camus with strong background in designing massive-scale distributed systems and building highly reliable infrastructure.
He served recently as Google engineer as an expert in structured data representations of real-world entities, payments and risk engineering. He was an author of Google’s Knowledge Graph and engineered other large-scale systems for data analytics and logging infrastructure. He received a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mathilde Badoual
Software Engineer
Mathilde Badoual | Software Engineer
Mathilde Badoual is a third year PhD student at UC Berkeley with Professor Scott Moura in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is a member of the Energy Control and Application Lab (eCAL) and focuses her work on optimization and control for integrating renewable energies on electricity market.
In addition to the PhD program she is working at Camus Energy on grid state estimation for Kit Carson Electric Cooperative. She studied electrical engineering and power systems in undergrad at Ecole CentraleSupelec in Paris, France and completed a Master in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Systems at UC Berkeley with a strong focus in optimization. After her masters she worked as an intern at Tesla in the Optimization and Market team, doing optimization for the 129 MWh Hornsdale (Australia) Tesla battery’s bidding strategy on the AEMO market. Her background includes power system, optimization, control (linear and nonlinear).
Milton Venetos
Consultant
Milton Venetos | Consultant
Milton Venetos is a product management consultant at Camus. He is a skilled engineer specializing in the creation and use of analytical modeling software packages — particularly within the energy industry.
He has 20-plus years experience launching, building and selling new hardware and software products and companies including GateCycle, acquired by GE Energy, and Linear Fresnel Solar at Ausra. He is a certified Six Sigma Greenbelt. He received a BSME, Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MSME, Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
Scott Backhaus
Consultant
Scott Backhaus | Consultant
Scott Backhaus is currently serving as an independent consultant to Camus Energy. He recently served as the Coordinator for Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and Geomagnetic Disturbance (GMD) impacts on critical infrastructure systems for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
He previously served in multiple roles in his 20-plus years at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), including Program Manager for the Office of Electricity, Program Manager for DHS Critical Infrastructure, principal investigator for several LANL projects funded by the Office of Electricity, and team lead for LANL’s component of the DHS National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Group. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley in the area of macroscopic quantum behavior of superfluid 3He and 4He.
Scott Fines
Software Engineer
Scott Fines | Software Engineer
Scott Fines is a software engineer and mathematician who specializes in algorithms and data structures for high performance distributed computing environments.
In particular, he has worked in building systems that maintain very high performance under massively concurrent load and extremely large data sets. Scott worked at NISC as an architect, designer, and developer of distributed applications for systems managing billions of electric readings that are processed every single day. He has received a BS in Mathematics, a BS in Physics, and an MS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Steven Brisley
Product Marketing
Steven Brisley | Product Marketing Manager
Steven Brisley is a Product Marketing leader at Camus and MBA student at UC Berkeley. He empowers forward-thinking utilities and energy companies to fight climate change through the application of innovative business models and technologies.
As a management consultant at Bain & Company, Steven supported leading utilities in their modernization of local grids and piloting of distributed energy resources. At Vertiv, a global critical infrastructure supplier, he transformed corporate governance — designing new strategic planning and performance management processes — while launching the cloud-based orchestration of UPS systems for demand response. A Wells Scholar, he received a B.S. in Business Administration with a focus in Economic Consulting & Public Policy from Indiana University.
Will Salisbury
Software Engineer
Will Salisbury | Software Engineer
Will is a software engineer with a background in electrical and computer engineering.
Prior to Camus, he was a founding member of Uber’s Maps team where he worked on geospatial datastores, search systems, and recommendation engines. He has also worked professionally as a security engineer, deploying multi-cloud service meshes and public-key infrastructure. Will holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Tufts University.
Help us build the future of energy.
- Are you a software engineer with 3+ years of experience and background in distributed systems, energy systems, data engineering, or frontend & UI? We’re hiring!
- Interested in joining our open source efforts?
- Just want to learn more?