Meet the experts behind autonomous reliability

Experts in distributed systems and causal analysis

Causely was founded by engineers and researchers who have spent decades advancing reliability, observability, and causal reasoning at scale. Our team includes multiple PhDs in computer science, a member of the OpenTelemetry governing board, and leaders who built enterprise-scale distributed systems adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide.

Shmuel Kliger, Ph.D.

Founder

Founder of Causely and previously Founder and President of Turbonomic (acquired by IBM). Earlier, he served as CTO at SMARTS and Dell EMC, shaping the foundations of automated performance management. With over three decades in distributed systems and IT operations, his work has redefined reliability engineering at scale. Shmuel holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Christine Miller

Co-Founder & Engineering Leader

Christine is a Co-Founder of Causely with over 20 years in enterprise software. She led large-scale reliability and observability programs at Turbonomic and IBM, following her earlier role as Director of Software Engineering at SMARTS, where she oversaw major initiatives in network management and event correlation. Christine holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT.

Endre Sara, Ph.D.

Co-Founder & Engineering Leader

Co-Founder of Causely and former Engineering Director at Turbonomic (acquired by IBM), Endre has over 20 years of experience designing distributed data and runtime platforms. Before joining Turbonomic, he served as Vice President of Enterprise Systems Management at Goldman Sachs, leading large-scale infrastructure and monitoring initiatives. Endre holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

Enlin Xu

Co-Founder & Engineering Leader

Co-Founder of Causely and former Director of Advanced Engineering at Turbonomic (acquired by IBM). Enlin has 12 patents in resource and container management and has led teams delivering AI-driven cloud optimization for enterprise-scale systems. A KubeCon speaker and innovator in distributed automation, he holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Steffen Geissinger

Co-Founder & Engineering Leader

Co-Founder of Causely and seasoned software architect with over 15 years of experience building distributed and data-intensive systems. Steffen spent more than 12 years at SAP as a Software Architect and technical lead for SAP Data Hub, and 3 years at Blue Yonder as a Principal Software Engineer focused on scalable analytics platforms. He holds 10 patents in distributed computing and applied data engineering. Steffen earned an M.Sc. in Applied Computer Science from FernUniversität Hagen and a B.Sc. in Applied Computer Science from DHBW Karlsruhe.

Dhairya Dalal, Ph.D.

Senior Applied AI Scientist

Senior Applied AI Scientist at Causely, Dhairya has over a decade of hands-on experience in large-scale data science, machine learning, and AI. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Galway, and a Master’s in Software Engineering from Harvard University. His research and applied work focus on causal inference, graph-based reasoning, and robust statistical modeling for complex distributed systems.

Severin Neumann

Head of Community & Open Source

Head of Community and Open Source at Causely, OpenTelemetry Maintainer, and member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee. Previously an Open Source Architect at Cisco and Senior Product Manager at AppDynamics, Severin has been instrumental in advancing open observability standards and ecosystems. He holds both a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universität Passau, Germany, where he was active in the IEEE Student Branch.

Our Mission

To prevent incidents, eliminate troubleshooting, and increase productivity for engineering teams who develop and operate modern applications.

Our founding story

The idea for Causely materialized from decades of real-world experience solving the challenges of operating distributed systems at scale. Our founder, Dr. Shmuel Kliger, has long been passionate about creating systems that save humans from troubleshooting. His entrepreneurial journey began in 1993 as the first employee and CTO at SMARTS, a startup that became the world's leading provider of real-time network management software when EMC acquired it for ~$300 Million in 2005. Shmuel then founded Turbonomic (originally named VMTurbo) in 2008, and the company became the leading provider of application resource management for private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. IBM acquired the company in 2021 for ~$2 Billion.

In 2022, Shmuel incorporated Causely to pursue the next frontier. Cloud-native architectures have become popular with engineers because of the speed and ease added for software development. However, these architectures make it exponentially more difficult to diagnose, remediate, and prevent application performance problems. This complexity and dynamism is the reason why we started Causely; to bring into the world a system capable of delivering autonomous service reliability for cloud native environments.

To bring this vision to life, Shmuel teamed up with experienced former Turbonomic engineering leaders Christine Miller, Endre Sara, and Enlin Xu, as well as Steffen Geissinger, a key member of the founding engineering team that built SAP HANA. Causely isn't chasing a fad; our vision is shaped by having deep, real-world experience building elegant solutions for complex problems. Our mission is to shift engineering teams from reactive troubleshooting to autonomous service reliability, which helps prevent business disruption and improve engineering productivity.