Valey Kamalov | Consulting Engineer
Valey Kamalov LLC

Valey is a founder of Kamalov LLC company dedicated to subsea environmental sensing and protection of submarine cables (since 2023). Valey discovered polarization based sensing with transcontinental submarine cables in January 2020, and has been devoted to optical fiber sensing technologies since then. He has authored numerous U.S. patents and scientific papers on fiber sensing, including most recently in Science, 2021, 2022, and 2023.  Valey retired from Google in 2023 after 15 ½ years of service. Valey joined Google as the company's first optical networking expert in 2007 and led the development of Google's original optical networking with innovative approach: the first SDM cable with pump sharing technology (Dunant cable), the first dispersion unmanaged subsea cable (SJC cable) with coherent receivers to increase fiber pair capacity. Valey led the design and operational aspects of the open line system approach, in terrestrial networking since 2010, and subsea including the first Open cable (Faster cable) with separation of optical wet plant and light terminal equipment based on signal to noise metrics. Valey initiated the subsea Open Cables movement and built an industry coalition. Valey received multiple awards and bonuses during his 15 years tenure at Google, becoming Principal Network Engineer. The highly efficient terrestrial network developed based on Valey’s new fiber and transmission standards more than a decade ago serves as a base for Google’s Cloud and other Google applications. Valey holds PhD in quantum electronics from Moscow State Lomonosov University, where he was teaching and conducting research in the field of molecular spectroscopy. He was one of the pioneers of picosecond time resolved nonlinear spectroscopy for which he earned Sc.D. from Russian Academy of Sciences. Valey is regarded as a visionary for grooming an industry ecosystem. SubseaOFC Summer School was a groundbreaking event that Valey brainchild and owned. He brought together a hundred students from 36 countries and enabled 60 folks from underrepresented countries and groups to attend Finland school. 30% women’s participation in the second school in Sweden in 2022 was a step in diversity improvement in the subsea industry. Valey was a visiting professor/researcher in universities in Japan, UK, USA, and most recently, in 2023 at PoliTo, Italy. He was serving as a Chair of Paper Committee SubOptic 2023. He serves as a Chair of SubOptic working group “Subsea Environmental Sensing with Operational Submarine Cables” and as Director on Optica Foundation Board. Since February 2025 Valey serves as submarine industry advisor at UN One Ocean Financing Facility