Ruslan Sirota was born in Uman, Ukraine, on November 4, 1980, and moved to Israel with his family in 1990, at age ten. He studied piano at the Bat-Yam music school and discovered jazz around fourteen. By sixteen he was the keyboardist in Confusion, an Israeli jazz-fusion band that landed a main-stage slot at the Red Sea Jazz Festival two years running, 1998 and 1999, sharing those bills with Chick Corea, Michael Brecker, and Brad Mehldau.

At eighteen, Sirota auditioned for Berklee College of Music and won a full tuition scholarship, moving to Boston in January 2000. He worked his way into the local scene as the resident keyboardist at Wally's Café, a jazz club a short walk from campus that has served as a proving ground for generations of Berklee students. Around 2004 he joined bassist Stanley Clarke's band and relocated to Los Angeles, the start of his professional career in the United States.

That move paid off in 2011, when Sirota won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album as a writer, performer, and producer on The Stanley Clarke Band (2010, Heads Up International). He shared the win with drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. Sirota plays acoustic piano and synthesizers on the opening track, "Soldier," which he also co-wrote and sings on. Pianist Hiromi Uehara plays acoustic piano on four other tracks on the same record, including "No Mystery," a Chick Corea composition that picked up a separate Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

The connection to Corea runs deeper than that one credit. As a teenager, Sirota watched him from the wings at the Red Sea Jazz Festival. On Sirota's own 2011 debut album, Ruslan, track thirteen is "In Truth," a duet with Corea; Stanley Clarke and George Duke guest on the same record.

Sirota's touring and session resume grew fast out of the Clarke years. He has recorded or toured with Seal, Al Jarreau, Josh Groban, Rachelle Ferrell, Ne-Yo, Marcus Miller, Brian McKnight, and the LA Philharmonic, and shows up across more than fifty Discogs-credited releases. He plays throughout Josh Groban's 2015 album Stages, and has three separate production and performance credits with bassist Thundercat between 2013 and 2018.

He kept releasing his own records alongside that session work. A Lifetime Away, a more personal, melodic project built around orchestral arrangements, first appeared as a limited CD in 2016 before a wider digital release on September 13, 2019, with Stanley Clarke, Gary Novak, Peter Erskine, Bob Mintzer, and John Patitucci all playing on it. Fruits of the Midi followed in August 2023 on his own Honey Rose Records, written, in his words, out of lockdowns and a difficult relationship in the same stretch of years; guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel guests on the track "La Bandera."

His most recent turn is also his least predictable. In 2019, Sirota reunited with Ronald Bruner Jr., his Grammy co-winner from a decade earlier, inside Tiny Room, a series on the Japanese label P-Vine that reworks pop and hip-hop albums into instrumental jazz. Sirota, Bruner, bassist MonoNeon, and drummer Robert "Sput" Searight are credited together on Drake's Scorpion Jazz Remix (2019), and again on Tiny Room Session (2025), a twenty-six track set of originals with pianist Greg Spero. Two players who once split a Grammy for a straight-ahead jazz-fusion record are now, together, turning rap albums into jazz records instead.

Sirota's own catalog runs from the acoustic-and-electric jazz fusion of the Stanley Clarke years (Rhodes and synthesizer stacked against upright and electric bass, in the tradition Clarke helped define with Chick Corea's Return to Forever) to the funk-and-groove instrumental reworkings of the Tiny Room series, where his playing sits inside a rhythm section built for hip-hop and R&B production rather than a straight-ahead swing feel. His three leader albums pull in a third direction again: Ruslan (2011) leans on guest-driven jazz-pop-rock songcraft, A Lifetime Away (2016/2019) adds orchestral string arrangements to a more intimate, melodic writing style, and Fruits of the Midi (2023) is the most personal of the three, built around a difficult period in his own life rather than a genre brief. Across all of it, the through line is a pianist equally comfortable soloing acoustically or texturing a track from behind a bank of synthesizers, which is exactly the role Stanley Clarke hired him for in the first place.