Saurabh Jha is a senior research scientist at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY. In 2024, he was appointed as the Research Product Focal (PI) for Instana, facilitating strategic collaboration between IBM Research and IBM Instana. He earned his Ph.D. in 2021 and his M.S. in Computer Science in 2016 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), following his B.Tech from VIT University. Before joining UIUC, he was a visiting scholar at NTU Singapore and he has previously worked with IBM, NVIDIA Research, and Microsoft Research as an intern or consultant.

Saurabh works at the intersection of AI and systems, spanning the vertical stack from AI agents for IT management tasks to optimizing the system stack for efficient execution of AI agents. His research has contributed to the integration of several innovative features into products deployed at scale. Most notably, his work has significantly enhanced the analytics capabilities of IBM Instana and Turbonomic, improving the resilience and performance of IT applications. His contributions helped position Instana as a leader in 2025 Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms. Additionally, his work contributed to the improved resilience of NVIDIA's DriveAGX platform for self-driving cars.

Saurabh has received numerous accolades, including the IBM Tech Award in 2024, the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2020-2021), the SAP Industry Ph.D. Scholarship (2014), and the VIT University Best Outgoing Student Award (2014). His work has earned best paper awards and honorable mentions at prestigious conferences such as ACM/IEEE SC 2020, IEEE ISSRE 2020, and ACM HPDC 2013.