Alan Eustace

Robert Alan Eustace (born December 19, 1956) is an American computer scientist who served as senior vice president of engineering and first senior vice president for knowledge at Google until retiring in 2015. On October 24, 2014, he made a free-fall jump from the stratosphere, breaking Felix Baumgartner's world record. The jump was from 135,890 feet (41.42 km), an altitude record that stands as of 2025^[update]. His freefall lasted 4 minutes 27 seconds, with a further 10 minutes under parachute. He won the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year in 2015.

The son of a Martin Marietta engineer, Eustace grew up in Pine Hills, Florida, then a working-class suburb of Orlando, where small ranch houses had been built for employees of the Martin Marietta Corporation. After graduating from Maynard Evans High School in 1974, he received a debate scholarship from Valencia College and attended it for a year before transferring to Florida Technological University—now known as the University of Central Florida—to major in mechanical engineering.

As a university student, Eustace worked part-time selling popcorn and ice cream in Fantasyland and working on the monorail at Walt Disney World. After taking a class on computer science, he decided to switch majors and ended up completing three academic degrees in the field, including a doctorate in 1984.

After graduation, Eustace worked briefly for Silicon Solutions, a startup in Silicon Valley, before joining Digital, Compaq and then HP's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked 15 years on pocket computing, chip multi-processors, power and energy management, internet performance, and frequency and voltage scaling. In the mid-1990s, he worked with Amitabh Srivastava on ATOM, a binary-code instrumentation system that forms the basis for a wide variety of program analysis and computer architecture analysis tools. These tools had a profound influence on the EV5, EV6 and EV7 chip designs.

Eustace was appointed head of the laboratory in 1999, but left it three years later to join Google, then a new startup. At Google, he worked as Senior Vice President of Engineering until he retired from that section of Google on March 27, 2015.^{[citation needed]}

As of 2025^[update], Eustace is board chair of Pivotal, sometimes giving interviews about their electric VTOL aircraft, the Pivotal BlackFly.

In the course of his professional career, Eustace co-authored nine publications and appeared as co-inventor in 10 patents.^{[citation needed]}

In 2011, Eustace decided to pursue a stratosphere jump and met with Taber MacCallum, one of the founding members of Biosphere 2, to begin preparations for the project. Over the next three years, the Paragon Space Development technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life-support system. The Paragon team integrated systems for the Stratospheric Explorer mission code named StratEx Space Dive.