Julio Avalos

Julio Avalos is GitHub’s Chief Strategy Officer and joined the company in December 2012. He serves on the company’s executive team overseeing the Legal, Policy, People, Strategic Partnerships, Marketing, and Communications teams. As Chief Strategy Officer, Julio is focused on the company vision and impact, in the future of software development, and helping to create a new generation of developers that redefines what it means to take part in technology, the new global economy, and how artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation should work for humans, not against them. Like the developers his teams support, Julio built GitHub Legal using the GitHub product, with lawyers writing in the lightweight Markdown programming language, crowdsourcing solutions to company legal issues and making the internal practice of law more distributed, open, and collaborative. In 2015, he was named the top in-house technology lawyer in the country by Legal 500 and was an inaugural recipient of The Recorder’s legal innovation awards. Prior to GitHub, Julio was Corporate Counsel for Yelp, and before that, represented Facebook, specializing in issues at the digital frontier, including cyber governance, intellectual property, online privacy, and digital rights and citizenship. The son of immigrants from Guatemala, Julio’s leadership approach is rooted in his experiences as a first-generation American, yogi, humanist and family man. His theoretical work has been published in American Imago, a journal of psychoanalysis published by Johns Hopkins University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Florida in 2003 and his law degree from Columbia University in 2006.