Zhamak Dehghani is a director of technology at Thoughtworks, where she focuses on distributed systems and data architecture in the enterprise. She is a member of multiple technology advisory boards, including Thoughtworks’, and has spent her career helping large organizations rethink how they build and operate data-intensive systems.

Zhamak is the founder of data mesh, the decentralized approach to data architecture that has reshaped how enterprises think about data at scale. Data mesh moves organizations away from monolithic, centrally managed data platforms toward a socio-technical model built on four ideas: data as a product with clear ownership and quality guarantees, domain-oriented ownership, self-serve data infrastructure, and federated computational governance. Her work on data products, data contracts, and mesh adoption roadmaps has given engineering leaders a concrete path from centralized bottlenecks to decentralized, discoverable, trustworthy data.

An advocate for the decentralization of all things, including architecture, data, and ultimately power, Zhamak has influenced a generation of data architects through her writing, her talks, and her work with enterprises adopting data mesh principles in practice.