Tareef Kawaf

President & CEO Posit PBC

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Tareef Kawaf is President and CEO of Posit PBC, the Boston company formerly known as RStudio. Posit makes open-source and commercial software for data science in R and Python. He joined in 2013 as president, alongside founder J.J. Allaire, who is now Founder & Executive Chair. That was early in the company’s history: RStudio was then a Boston startup building tools around the open-source R language. Posit is now a public benefit corporation and certified B Corp. Its commercial products pay for free tools such as the RStudio IDE, Positron, Shiny and Quarto. Before RStudio, Kawaf spent eight years running engineering and operations at Brightcove through its growth to an IPO.

Career Highlights

• President & CEO of Posit PBC, as signed in the company’s July 2026 public benefit corporation report.
• Joined RStudio as president in 2013, shortly after leaving Brightcove.
• Named as an executive officer of RStudio, PBC in the company’s 2021 and 2022 Form D filings with the SEC.
• SVP of engineering and operations at Brightcove for more than eight years, during which the online video platform went from zero to $92 million in revenue and went public.
• Co-inventor on a dynamic pricing patent that became part of Oracle’s ATG Commerce retail pricing.
• B.S. in Computer Science, with a minor in Mathematics, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1994.

Professional Journey

Kawaf graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994 with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. He built his career in early-stage software companies around Boston. One result was a jointly held patent for a method and system for dynamic pricing, which became a key part of the retail pricing in Oracle’s ATG Commerce.

His longest role before RStudio was at Brightcove, the online video platform, where he was senior vice president of engineering and operations for more than eight years. By RStudio’s account, Brightcove grew over that time from zero to $92 million in revenue and completed an initial public offering.

He left Brightcove in January 2013, and by that June Boston.com reported that he was president of RStudio. RStudio was a Boston startup building software and services around the open-source R statistical computing environment. Its founder, J.J. Allaire, is the brother of Brightcove founder Jeremy Allaire. The company raised a $161 million offering in 2021, and its Form D filing named Kawaf and Allaire as its executive officers. It rebranded as Posit in 2022, a sign that its tools now covered Python and the wider data science stack as well as R. It is organized as a public benefit corporation and is a certified B Corp.

Posit now names Kawaf President & CEO and Allaire Founder & Executive Chair. As CEO he has spoken publicly about running a public benefit corporation that weighs social good alongside profit and gives away free and open-source tools for scientific research and technical communication. At Emmanuel College in 2025, he said his computer science training shapes how he runs the company: “Systems thinking, process engineering, abstraction, understanding networks—these principles help me evaluate organizational structures, anticipate bottlenecks, and solve complex problems.”

He lives outside Boston with his family.

Education

University of Massachusetts Amherst

B.S., Computer Science (minor in Mathematics), 1994