Cloudflare engineering head Ben Fathi retires, John Graham-Cumming replaces him

Cloudflare , a company that provides a content-delivery network (CDN) with security features aimed at keeping websites online and loading quickly, has chosen John Graham-Cumming to take over for Ben Fathi as the company’s head of engineering. Fathi, previously the chief technology officer of VMware, announced today in a blog post that he’s retiring after spending a year at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare cofounder and chief executive, Matthew Prince, confirmed the changes in an email to VentureBeat.

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“Ben decided to retire from an operating role and, while it sounds cliché, spend more time with his family,” Prince wrote.

It was something he and I talked about at length over the last few months and, in the end, both decided it was the right thing. The blog post he published today is sincere and aligns with the discussions we’d had over the last several months. … I’ll add that Ben was very helpful in getting Cloudflare through the last year and professionalizing our engineering organization. We’re in a better place with better processes and a more stable operating environment for having had him on the team.

In his blog, Fathi, 52, notes that he’s been “obsessed over work for the past thirty-five years” and “ignored ‘life'” along the way. Before joining VMware in 2012, he worked at SGI, Microsoft, and Cisco. His departure from Cloudflare isn’t work-related, he wrote.

“Of course, there are always new technologies, new ideas, and new companies to get excited about, but I find, for one reason or another, I usually end up running an engineering organization, and that often amounts to 90 percent repetition and frustration and, at best, 10 percent ‘new’ and exciting,” Fathi wrote.

Graham-Cumming, a founder of Electric Cloud, joined Cloudflare in 2012, when he chose “programmer” as his title. In an interview last year he described himself as being “behind the scenes behind the scenes” at Cloudflare. But he’s the person behind the POPFile open-source spam filtering software. And, in 2009, he began a petition asking the United Kingdom government to posthumously apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment, which led to an apology from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a mercy pardon from Queen Elizabeth II.

San Francisco-based CloudFlare was supporting more than 10 million customer domains in the first half of this year, according to its most recent transparency report. Last year, the company announced a $110 million funding round; investors include Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm.