Avi Kivity (Hebrew: אבי קויתי) is a software engineer who created the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor underlying many production clouds. Following his work on KVM, Kivity developed the Seastar framework and the ScyllaDB database. He co-founded the company ScyllaDB with Dor Laor; Kivity is CTO and an active project contributor.

Kivity began the development of KVM at Qumranet in 2006. After Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008, Kivity joined Red Hat and continued as the lead developer and maintainer of KVM.

After leaving Red Hat in 2012, Kivity co-founded a company called Cloudius Systems with Dor Laor. Cloudius developed the OSv operating system for the cloud. While at Cloudius, Kivity created the Seastar framework, an open-source (Apache 2.0 licensed) C++ framework for I/O intensive asynchronous computing. Seastar later became the foundation for high performance distributed systems such as ScyllaDB, Redpanda, and Ceph.

In mid-2014, Cloudius Systems was renamed to ScyllaDB, after its main product which is used for high-throughput database workloads that require low latencies. (Forbes) Kivity serves as the company's chief technology officer and contributes to the source code development of ScyllaDB as well as Seastar.

Kivity has been granted patents for technologies implemented in KVM and ScyllaDB