Jawed Karim (born October 28, 1979) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. The site's inaugural video, "Me at the zoo", uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 287 million times as of October 1, 2023. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components, including its real-time anti-fraud system.

In university, Karim served an Internship at Silicon Graphics, Inc., where he worked on 3D voxel data management for very large data sets for volume rendering, including the data for the Visible Human Project. While working at PayPal in 2002, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Three years later, in 2005, they founded the video-sharing website YouTube. Karim created the first channel on YouTube, "jawed", on April 23, 2005 PDT (April 24, 2005 UTC), and uploaded the website's first video, "Me at the zoo", the same day.

After co-founding the company and developing the YouTube concept and website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Karim enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University while acting as an adviser to YouTube. When the site was introduced in February 2005, Karim agreed not to be an employee and simply be an informal adviser, and that he was focusing on his studies. As a result, he took a much lower share in the company compared to Hurley and Chen.