Shaswat Gupta

Shaswat Gupta is a Research Engineer at IBM Research - Zurich, working at the intersection of data systems and machine learning. His research centers on query optimization and routing for heterogeneous lakehouses and distributed engines such as Spark, Flink, and PrestoDB, and spans increasingly heterogeneous hardware, including GPUs, by jointly reasoning about latency, memory, and cloud costs.

Gupta holds an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zürich, where he specialized in Machine Intelligence and Database Management Systems. His master’s thesis (Prof. Gustavo Alonso, Systems@ETHZ) received the ETH Medal for an outstanding master’s thesis; the work led to papers at VLDB and SIGMOD.

Before ETH, Gupta was a Data Scientist at AB-InBev, building machine learning systems for supply chain and commercial analytics. This shaped a conviction that carries into his research: clean abstractions matter, but so do observability, failure modes, and the details that only surface once a distributed system goes into production.

He completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Bombay, graduating at the top of his batch (Department Rank 1) with several academic awards, while pursuing a parallel interest in journalism and technical writing.