Champions of Scale: Celebrating the engineers pushing the limits of real-time infrastructure

Some teams build apps, some build features, and some build systems that change what’s possible. These are the Champions of Scale: architects, engineers, and tech leaders who make it possible for today’s most ambitious applications to perform in real time, stay always-on, and scale efficiently even during massive spikes. And for the first time, Aerospike is recognizing those engineers with a program made just for them.

Introducing the Champions of Scale awards

The Champions of Scale awards honor the builders behind the most resilient, efficient, and high-performance real-time data systems in the world. But this isn’t about who uses Aerospike. It’s about who builds what others say can’t be built, at scale, under pressure, and with real impact. 

Whether you’re using Aerospike, Snowflake, Redis, Kafka, S3, custom ML pipelines, or all of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve built something that can go toe-to-toe with today’s AI, personalization, and data infrastructure demands.

We’re looking for the people who solve internet-scale challenges in fraud detection, identity graphs, customer 360 platforms, AdTech, FinTech, gaming, payments, and beyond.

Judging panel

Entries will be evaluated by a panel of engineers and industry experts who’ve led large-scale infrastructure at some of the world’s most data-intensive companies. That includes:

• Srini V. Srinivasan, Ph.D., founder and CTO of Aerospike. As one of the database pioneers in Silicon Valley at companies like Oracle and Yahoo!, Srini has spent decades designing, deploying, and operating high-scale infrastructure.

• Srinivasan (Sesh) Seshadri, Ph.D., chief evangelist of Aerospike. Sesh has spent decades building and operating business-critical infrastructure as the former vice president of data and discovery at Target, CTO of Yahoo!, and director of engineering at Google.

• Plus leaders in AI/ML, data science, and distributed systems from across the ecosystem

Together, this judging panel will look for and champion architectures that scale, deliver value, and inspire.

Who should apply

If you’re a CTO, chief architect, VP of engineering, principal data platform engineer, machine learning or site reliability engineer, or part of a technical team building infrastructure at scale, you belong here.

If your systems power real-time bidding, payments, customer insights, recommendation engines, or AI inference in production, this program is for you.

If you’ve solved for sub-millisecond latency, multi-region consistency, cost-efficient scale, or resilience under dynamic workloads, you’re already a Champion. This is your moment to share it.

Why it matters now

We’re in a new era of infrastructure pressure. Enterprises are processing more data than ever. Thanks to mobile adoption, cloud-first strategies, and the rise of AI-driven workloads, everything is scaling faster than traditional architectures were built to handle. More throughput is required. Smaller latency windows are non-negotiable. And infrastructure costs are climbing fast.

All of this is happening while users expect more, not less. That’s the tension Champions of Scale are navigating every day. They’re the ones solving for all four dimensions of modern scale:

• Innovation: Supporting new workloads like real-time machine learning inference (predictive AI), generative and agentic AI, personalization, and event-driven architectures

• Cost-efficiency: Scaling horizontally without spiraling costs, and updating without lifting and shifting entire stacks

• Throughput: Supporting millions of transactions per second with predictable behavior under peak load

• Latency: Delivering insights in less than a millisecond to keep up with user and system demands

This is what makes real-time infrastructure hard and what makes those who build it worth celebrating.

The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey confirms it:

• 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% last year.

• 48% of developers influence or directly drive tech purchasing decisions for their companies.

• 69% learned new coding techniques or languages in the past year, with 44% learning through AI tools.

That means developers aren’t just building. They’re driving decisions, pushing architecture forward, and redefining what today’s scale looks like. Champions of Scale is here to spotlight that momentum.

What winners might showcase: Fidelity in the spotlight

Champions of Scale build for the real world: with legacy constraints, hard latency requirements, unpredictable spikes, and unforgiving requirements.

Take Fidelity Investments, for example. Its data architecture team needed to serve real-time scoring and insights across the enterprise, run within the constraints of a regulated, cloud-native enterprise environment. “We use Snowflake heavily at Fidelity,” said Kyle Bush, architect at Fidelity. “Our entire enterprise data lake across all of our business units is built on top of AWS on Snowflake.”

But Snowflake alone couldn’t deliver the responsiveness required for interaction-level workloads such as web clicks, chat logs, and voice calls. “We have transaction data, operational data, we have market data,” he said. “We also have interaction data, which is more of our near real-time data.” 

To meet those needs, the team deployed Aerospike in front of Snowflake for low-latency scoring and fast, API-level access to enriched insights. “At Fidelity, about every 60 days, no matter what workload you have, you have to fully rehydrate,” Bush explained. “And for a lot of platforms, that’s hard. With Aerospike, it was really, really easy. Our group actually built a managed service around Aerospike to offer this to all the other business units.” 

This is what Champions of Scale looks like: not just delivering performance, but doing it within enterprise compliance boundaries, with repeatability, and across teams.

What winners might showcase: PayPal’s fraud detection

Another Champion of Scale example comes from PayPal, where real-time fraud detection runs at global scale inside a highly regulated, always‑on environment.

By using Aerospike’s patented Hybrid Memory Architecture with Intel Optane PMem, PayPal built an architecture that blends fast memory and persistent storage for real-time fraud detection with machine learning inference (predictive AI) at petabyte scale.

Results include:

• 30x tighter fraud exposure adherence, boosting SLA compliance from 98.5% to 99.95%

• 5x throughput improvement, from 200K TPS to 1M TPS

• Almost 90% fewer servers, dropping from 1,024 down to 120 nodes

• Approximately $9M hardware cost savings projected from $12.5m down to $3.5m, more than 70%

• 12x faster re-indexing, reducing cluster startup time dramatically

PayPal’s challenge is multi-faceted: Scaling for billions of annual dollars in risk, while onboarding new threat models and datasets continuously. It delivers sub‑millisecond performance even as data volumes grow 32% year-over-year, with 99.99% uptime across production clusters.

Dates to remember

• Nominations are open now through August 29, 2025

• Community voting runs August 8 – September 1, 2025

• Winners will be announced starting September 10, 2025

How to apply

Nominate yourself. Nominate your team. Nominate someone you work with who deserves more visibility for what they’ve built. Submissions can include:

• A short write-up or presentation of the system

• Key performance or cost-efficiency metrics

• Business or product outcomes tied to infrastructure decisions

You don’t need to write a novel. Just show what you built and why it matters.

Shine a light on the systems that scale

You’ve shipped the infrastructure behind today’s payment systems, personalization systems, fraud engines, and recommendation services. You’ve tuned for latency, tested for concurrency, and delivered systems that scale with grace under pressure.

Let’s spotlight that work. Nominate your story and help us celebrate the engineers building the future of real-time data.