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Berlin 2024

Speakers

Berlin
speakers

About the speakers

Meet the experts from global companies like Apple, Pinterest, Splunk, Netflix, Shopify, and more, who have built scalable streaming infrastructure and enterprise-grade applications.

Hear why and how they use Flink as the stream processing engine of choice for large-scale stateful applications, including real-time analytics, real-time search and content ranking, fraud/anomaly/threat detection.

Speakers

 

Zhenqiu Huang Software Engineeer Apple
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Zhenqiu Huang has been in Apache Flink Community for many years. He has been building Streaming Platform in Uber Technology and Apple Inc for last several years. Recently, he worked with Openlineage community on building data Lineage for Apache Flink applications.

Mike Gualtieri VP, Principal Analyst Forrester
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Mike's research focuses on AI technologies, platforms, and practices that enable technology professionals to deliver applications that lead to prescient digital experiences and breakthrough operational efficiency. His key technology coverage areas are AI and emerging technologies that make software faster, smarter, and transformative for global enterprises and organizations. He advises business and technology leaders around the world on the intersection of business strategy, AI, and digital transformation.
Mike has authored more than 130 research reports and is a recipient of the Forrester Courage Award for making bold calls that inspire Forrester clients to make great business and technology decisions.
He is a frequent and highly sought-after speaker at industry, corporate, and technology events for his audience-designed, insightful, and energetic speeches.
Mike provides technology vendors with actionable advisory sessions on technology buying trends, strategy advice, messaging, product roadmaps, and buyer personas for the areas he directly covers. He also offers “what-if” investment advisory for clients who wish to invest in or launch new products in the markets he covers.

Yang Yang Sr Staff Software Engineer Uber
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Yang is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Uber, and she leads Uber's Streaming Data (Kafka) and Flink team. She focuses on building a highly scalable and reliable real-time data system at scale for thousands of engineers and data scientists at Uber.
Lu Niu Sr Staff Software Engineer Pinterest
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Lu Niu is the founding member and current Tech Lead of the Streaming Data Processing team at Pinterest. Prior to joining Pinterest, he played a pivotal role in building Presto as a Service at Uber. Lu is passionate about big data and distributed systems, and has contributed to several prominent projects including Flink, Presto, and Velox. 
Ejas Khan Senior Technical Lead Mercedes-Benz
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Senior technical lead with 8 years of experience in distributed system design and development.
Subham Rakshit Streaming Solution Architect AWS
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Subham Rakshit is a Streaming Solutions Architect for Analytics at AWS based in the UK. He works with customers to design and build streaming architectures so that they can get value from analysing their streaming data. His two little daughters keep her occupied most of the time outside work and loves solving jigsaw puzzles with them.
Stephan Ewen Founder Restate
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Stephan co-founded 'Restate' (https://restate.dev/) with the goal to simplify building distributed applications and microservice architectures.
Before that, he was the one of the original creators and of Apache Flink and founder / CTO of dataArtisans/Ververica. Stephan holds a Ph.D. in database systems.
Pawel Leszczynski Openlineage contributor Astronomer
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Data practitioner with decade long experience, holding PhD in distributed databases. Currently fully involved in Openlineage - an open platform for collection and analysis of data lineage with special focus on automatic lineage extraction.

Yuan Mei Director of Engineering Alibaba
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Dr. Yuan Mei is a PMC member of the Apache Flink project focusing on the State and Runtime stack. She is the Director of Engineering at Alibaba and leads the Flink storage engine team. She is also the architect of Flink Engine. Before joining Alibaba, Dr. Mei was a research scientist at Facebook, leading and developing various streaming systems. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL.
Xintong Song Staff Software Engineer Alibaba Cloud
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Xintong Song is a Staff Software Engineer and leads a team that works in Flink’s distributed execution framework at Alibaba Cloud. He is also an Apache Flink PMC member and committer, the starter and promoter of Flink 2.0. He holds a Ph.D. from Peking University.
Xingcan Cui Software Engineer Promoted.ai
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Xingcan Cui is a committer for Apache Flink. He currently works as a software engineer at Promoted.ai, leading the development and management of the data platform and pipelines. With over a decade of experience specializing in backend development, data management, and data infrastructure, he is interested in database theories and distributed systems, particularly distributed stream processing.
Tucker Harvey Software Engineer Pinterest
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Tucker Harvey graduated from UC Berkeley in December 2022. Currently, he is part of the Streaming Data Processing team at Pinterest, where he works on Flink as a Service to support various streaming use cases within the company. Prior to this, he interned at Pinterest on both the Batch Data Processing team and the Query Platform team, gaining valuable experience in large-scale data processing and real-time data query systems.
Chen Qin Sr Manager Pinterest
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Chen serves as Sr Manager overseeing Pinterest data processing. 
Steffen Hoellinger CEO Airy
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Steffen is the CEO and co-founder at Airy, an open-source framework to build Copilots and LLM-integrated streaming apps
Samuel von Baussnern Consultant, Lead Developer & Tech Lead D-ONE
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Sam is the lead developer and tech lead of a small team that creates, maintains and operates a real-time data distribution platform, distributing TBs of data in the milliseconds total latency range worldwide. Now he spends most of his time advising companies on their journey to event-driven systems' architecture and creating maintainable data warehouses.
Sai Sharath Dandi Senior Software Engineer Uber
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Sai Sharath Dandi is a software engineer on Uber's Streaming Analytics Team. He is a contributor to Flink and focuses on building new features for UBER's managed Flink SQL platform. Outside of work, he enjoys playing table tennis and basketball.
Roee Hasson Engineering Lead DockTech
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Roee Hasson is the Engineering Lead of the R&D team at DockTech. With over 4 years of experience in software engineering, he has a robust background of working in a multidisciplinary environment ranging from data engineering and cloud development to backend and full stack. Roee designed and built DockTech’s data infrastructure and resources, developed many of the pipelines used for the company’s products, and is now spearheading the streaming efforts for the real-time products. Roee also manages the IoT device fleet deployed over 10 countries, from assembling and installations, through maintenance and monitoring, to debugging and managing OTA updates.
Pedro Mázala Staff Engineer Evoura
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Working as a Platform Engineer, Pedro Mázala helps teams achieve scalable systems with architectures based on stream processing, durable execution, back pressure by design, and other cool words on the tech side of the force.

As a Platform Engineer, Pedro sees this role as a tool to help Product Teams achieve scalability and reliability without losing the focus on what matters, THE PRODUCT. Distributed systems, shared lock mechanisms, ordering, back pressure, retryability, reprocessing, idempotency, and other scary words must be sorted by design to allow healthy and strong products to grow.

You may hear him asking questions about ordering and delivery guarantees here and there.
Duy Canh Tran Senior Data Engineer Grab
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Hello World! I’m Calvin, an engineer by education, data janitor by profession, and content creator by passion. I left the beautiful cityscapes of Vietnam to dive deep into the data oceans in the vivacious city of Singapore.
Currently, I find myself swabbing the cyber-decks of Grab - Southeast Asia’s biggest ridesharing company! Prior to my journey here, I served as a MLOps at Honestbee and a Data Scientist at Yokogawa Singapore, yes, you heard it right, I’ve been cleaning and crunching numbers for a living!
Ng Shi Kai Lead Software Engineer Grab
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Shipping data and empowering data users performing transformation processes safely and easily
Nhat Nguyen Senior Software Engineer Grab
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Aspiring problem solver, currently focusing on enhancing developer experience, making stream data more accessible, and empowering users with real-time insights.
Robin Stephenson Software Engineer Marshall Wace
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Robin has been working as a Software Engineer in Marshall Wace's technology team for the past 4 years. He graduated in Computer Science at the University Of York.
Mohsin Niazi Software Engineer Marshall Wace
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Mohsin has been a Software Engineer on Marshall Wace's technology team for the past year and a half. Prior to that, he worked as a Software Engineer at Apple.
Mayank Juneja Product Manager, Stream Processing Confluent
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Mayank is a Product Manager for Stream Processing at Confluent, leading real-time AI initiatives. He holds extensive experience of building and launching enterprise software products, with stints in VMware, Amazon, and Bidgely - an AI for clean-tech startup.

He has previously been a keynote speaker at Kafka Summit London and Kafka Summit Bangalore.
Hao Li Staff Software Engineer Confluent
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Hao Li is a software engineer at Confluent in Kafka Streams team. Prior to that, he helped building machine learning infrastructure using stream processing at Meta.
Maximilian Michels Software Engineer Apple
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Max is a software engineer at Apple who loves stream processing and Flink. Concurrent algorithms and distributed systems were his favorite subjects in school. Max previously worked on large-scale data processing tools and platforms at Google, Lyft, and Splunk. Max is a PMC member at the Apache Flink project. 
Maciej Bryński Head of Data Digital Bank
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On a daily basis, I design state-of-the-art data platforms and dive deep into big data technologies. I have contributed to open-source projects like Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Apache Flink, and I enjoy teaching others through training sessions. I've spoken at various industry conferences, including Flink Forward in 2020, where I shared practical insights and experiences. I am passionate about using big data to solve real-world problems and love connecting with others in the field to exchange ideas and foster innovation.
Lincoln Lee Staff engineer Alibaba Cloud
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Lincoln is a Committer and PMC member of Apache Flink. He is a staff engineer from Alibaba Cloud and has been focused on Flink SQL and stream-batch unification for many years.
Leonard Xu Apache Flink PMC Member & Committer Alibaba
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Apache Flink PMC Member & Committer, Flink CDC Lead. Work at Alibaba, Focus on Data Engineering and CDC
Karin Landers Product Marketing Manager Ververica
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Data and operations number cruncher, workflow creator, manager, and storyteller. Karin has spent 5 years working behind-the-scenes with Apache Open Source projects, products and people, including the Pulsar and Flink communities. 
JinYun Soo Software Engineer Bloomberg LP
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JinYun Soo is a software engineer and co-lead of the Distributed Systems Guild at Bloomberg, a community that learns, utilizes, and drives distributed technologies that power Bloomberg’s business.

After obtaining a Master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering, she took on career opportunities in Bloomberg’s Enterprise Technology space, first in the company’s London office and now in New York City. As part of the Event Streaming Engineering team, she works on real-time data streaming, making use of open source tools such as Apache Flink and Apache Kafka.
Jingsong Li Staff Engineer Alibaba
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Since 2014, he has focused on the research and development of streaming computing within Alibaba. Since 2017, he has focused on the development of Alibaba Blink, and also contributed Apache Flink community actively.

Recently, he mainly focuses on Apache Paimon, a unifying streaming and batch lake storage.
Jark Wu Head of Flink SQL Alibaba Cloud
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Jark Wu is a PMC member and Committer of the Apache Flink project. He started working on Flink in the early days of the project. Currently, he serves as the Head of Flink SQL at Alibaba Cloud. He is devoted to building a fully managed Apache Flink service on Alibaba Cloud.
Ioannis Stavrakantonakis Staff Software Engineer Ververica
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Ioannis combines his research & development experience from the academia with his software engineering experience in distributed systems and ML from Big Tech into his current role in Ververica, where he leads the development of the Ververica Platform.
Giannis Polyzos Staff Streaming Product Architect Ververica
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Giannis is an Engineer and Architect with extensive experience in stream and stream processing systems. Over the years he has worked in architecting streaming data pipelines with technologies like Spark, Kafka, Pulsar, and Flink. These days he focuses on Apache Flink and Streaming Lakehouses.
Flaviu Cicio Architect Acosom
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As an experienced engineer, he dedicates his efforts to designing and implementing intricate streaming solutions that meet the highest standards. Over the years, he has accumulated extensive experience with Flink, Kafka, Java, and event-driven microservice architectures.
Robin Fehr Software Architect / Co-Founder Acosom
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My name is Robin - I'm a Software Architect and Co-Founder of Acosom GmbH. At Acosom, we specialize in stream processing, big data, databases, and event-driven software architecture. Acosom became a Confluent partner last year and is helping to accelerate the streaming space. 

Over the past 16 years in the field, I've worked as a software engineer, data engineer, and software architect. I have founded several startups, such as an SDK-based A/B testing software, trying to enter the gaming market against Optimizely. Trying to build dynamic live-data visualizations into this A/B testing software has led my Co-Founder and me down the data storage journey. With the knowledge gained over the past eight years, we founded Acosom in 2020.
Sharon Xie Founding Engineer and Product Lead Decodable
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Sharon is a founding engineer at Decodable. Currently she leads product management and development. She has over six years of experience in building and operating streaming data platforms, with extensive expertise in Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Debezium. Before joining Decodable, she served as the technical lead for the real-time data platform at Splunk, where her focus was on the streaming query language and developer SDKs.
Eric Xiao Senior Software Engineer Decodable
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Eric Xiao is a seasoned data platform engineer with extensive experience building 100s of pipelines for both batch and streaming use cases. With a background spanning 4 years at Shopify and 1 year at Walmart, Eric has demonstrated expertise in building both a Apache Spark batch and stream processing and Flink streaming platforms. Now, as a key member of Decodable, Eric continues to build the Flink data platform at Decodable, leveraging their expertise to develop cutting-edge solutions for complex customer data challenges.
Dunith Dhanushka Senior Developer Advocate Redpanda
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Dunith avidly enjoys designing, building, and operating large-scale real-time, event-driven architectures. He's got 10+ years of doing so and loves to share his learnings through blogging, videos, and public speaking.
Dunith works at Redpanda as a Senior Developer Advocate, where he spends much time educating developers about building event-driven applications with Redpanda.
Dominik Žnidaršič Developer
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Dominik is a seasoned backend developer with a robust background, spanning construction software, financial systems optimization, and data analytics. Starting with robust microservices using MongoDB, Dominik shifted focus to optimizing and decomposing a high-transaction Oracle database, enhancing both performance and reliability. Recently, he has embraced the challenge of real-time data analytics, applying his deep-seated passion for performance optimization to Apache Flink projects. Dominik's work is driven by a zeal for maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in both code and infrastructure.
Sijie Guo Co-Founder and CEO StreamNative
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Sijie Guo is the Co-Founder and CEO of StreamNative. StreamNative is a real-time data infrastructure startup offering a cloud-native event streaming platform powered by Apache Pulsar for the enterprises. Before StreamNative, he co-founded Streamlio. Before Streamlio, he worked for Twitter as the tech lead for the messaging infrastructure group, where he co-created DistributedLog and Twitter EventBus. Before Twitter, he worked on the push notification infrastructure at Yahoo!. 

He is also the VP of Apache BookKeeper and PMC member of Apache Pulsar.
Christos Anagnostakis Freelance Enterprise Architect
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Christos is an Enterprise Architect with strong technical background and over 20 years in the software industry. His soft spots are Event Streaming, Lisp, observability, TLA+ and last, but not least, tennis and tango. 
Ben Augarten Software Engineer Stripe
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Ben is a software engineer providing a managed Flink offering at Stripe. Previously, he's worked on large scale data streaming applications at Splunk and Twitter
Pratyush Sharma Software Engineer Stripe
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Pratyush Sharma is Software Engineer at Stripe who has worked on providing flink as a platform. Prior to Stripe, he worked at Swiggy, working on building a ML serving and feature computation platform.
Aratz Manterola Lasa Software Engineer WarpStream
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Aratz is a software engineer at Warpstream Labs and was the first engineer to join the company. He has contributed to many of the distributed systems behind Warpstream and the Kafka Protocol. Aratz holds a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and a Master’s in Distributed Systems from VU University.
Ramesh Motaparthy Principal Software Engineer New Relic
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Over 20 years of software engineering and consulting experience with emphasis on microservices, cloud-native applications, Streaming Applications, DevOps, Kubernetes, Business Process Management, Workflow, Data Engineering and Enterprise Application Integration.
Antón Rodríguez Principal Software Engineer New Relic
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Antón is a Principal Software Engineer focused on Data in motion. He has a passion for building high-throughput streaming systems and solving the challenges that come with them. He’s also a JUG organiser, blogger, podcaster and speaker.
Medi van Broekhoven Sr. Product Owner SALTO
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Seasoned professional with over 30 years of experience in Product & Service Ownership, Operational Management, System Architecture and (Technical) Project Management. Always focused on providing the missing link between business concept and technology.
Alper Basaran Data Lead SALTO
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Alper is a Data Science expert with diverse experience in software development and data engineering. He led the way in creating the first data team at Salto - of which he is the current team lead - and implementing Flink as the primary stream processing engine.
Alireza Moosavi Data Engineer SALTO
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Alireza, a data engineer at Salto, has been building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines across various industries for over 6 years. He is primarily focused on developing distributed real-time systems and data lakehouse architecture.
Ali Alemi Streaming Specialist Solutions Architect AWS
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Ali Alemi is a Streaming Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. Ali advises AWS customers with architectural best practices and helps them design real-time analytics data systems which are reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective. He works backward from customer’s use cases and designs data solutions to solve their business problems. Prior to joining AWS, Ali supported several public sector customers and AWS consulting partners in their application modernization journey and migration to the Cloud.
Alex Balfur VP Product Datorios
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Alex Balfur, a VP of Product at Datorios, possesses 18 years of expertise in B2D products. Initially, he spent 9 years as a developer and architect for observability products and then led several observability products. He has a track record of building analytics, data mining, and real-time monitoring products, which demand real-time data collection and insights. His introduction to Flink occurred during this period, as it was extensively utilized for stream processing and monitoring data.
Colten Pilgreen Flink Advisor Datorios
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Colten Pilgreen is Datorios’ Flink Advisor. He has been an invested user of the Flink Framework for the past 4 years in both the transportation industry and now in the Ad Tech space at Hulu. He comes to the table with 9 years of Data Engineering experience, but has been tinkering in various programming spaces for the past 15 years. Colten has been a key member of the teams he’s worked with from designing, implementing, and troubleshooting a whole host of Flink Pipelines; Along with standing up, managing, and further improving the required infrastructure to run and monitor these pipelines he’s responsible for.
Ben Gamble Field CTO Ververica
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Ben Gamble serves as Field CTO at Ververica. In his role, he focuses on developing messaging and materials to engage with key stakeholders, including clients, prospects, and industry analysts. 
With a background primarily in engineering leadership and entrepreneurship, Ben has extensive experience building and managing engineering teams across various sectors, including logistics, gaming, and mobile applications. His expertise lies in developing solutions centered around real-world interactions, particularly in areas such as GPS-based technologies, augmented reality, and multi-user collaboration.
Outside of his professional life, Ben is an avid technology enthusiast. He enjoys playing and creating video games and trading cards. Ben balances his career with family life, being a father to two young children and a caretaker to three pet ducks.
Gunnar Morling Senior Staff Software Engineer Decodable
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Gunnar Morling is a software engineer and open-source enthusiast by heart, currently working at Decodable on real-time ETL based on Apache Flink. In his prior role as a software engineer at Red Hat, he led the Debezium project, a distributed platform for change data capture. He is a Java Champion and has founded multiple open source projects such as JfrUnit, kcctl, and MapStruct. Gunnar is an avid blogger (morling.dev) and has spoken at various conferences like QCon, Java One, and Devoxx. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.

David Anderson Software Practice Lead Confluent
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Gyula Fora Software Engineer and Flink PMC Apple
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Gyula is a Software Engineer at Apple, focusing on running and improving integration for Flink on cloud infrastructure.

He has been a committer and contributor since the early days of Flink streaming. He has used Flink in large scale production at King for several years before joining Cloudera in 2019 to work on enterprise integration and deliver the company's first Flink distribution.

Gyula currently lives in Switzerland and in his free time enjoys traveling, scuba diving and skiing around the world.

Shai Somekh Product Manager Datorios
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Shai Somekh is a Product Manager at Datorios, where she has helped develop many of the released and upcoming critical features. With a background in machine learning and responsible AI and her diverse experience in the company where she started as a Customer Success Manager, Shai brings valuable insights to her work in product management. Her journey into product management follows her drive for the best outcomes for the customer and her entrepreneurial spirit (demonstrated by establishing a popular restaurant and nightlife guide in Tel Aviv). With this diverse background and passion for learning, Shai is excited to continue growing and contributing to the world of tech, product management, and, most importantly, Data Streaming.
Fulvio Pascotto Data Architect Intesa Sanpaolo
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Data Architect Tech Lead with over 20 years of experience in IT, co-designer of the Intesa Sanpaolo framework for Flink “SCRAT”. Previously worked as a Solution Architect and Senior developer in the Data Technology Department, where he designed several architectures based on the streaming stack and develop components to leverage the digital transformation.
Raffaele Saggino Senior IT Infrastructure Architect Intesa Sanpaolo
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Senior IT Infrastructure Architect, PMP, specialized in distributed computing and event-driven architectures. Project Manager of the Batch Layer Renewal and Serverless projects. Worked several years as Senior Engineer in the "Data Communication" team and introduced Apache Kafka, Apache NiFi and Apache Storm in the company.
Andrea Fonti Data Architect Agile Lab
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A seasoned data architect and software engineer with 11+ years of experience, specializes in streaming technologies and large-scale data processing systems. He has designed critical data architectures for aerospace missions, including ExoMars and International space station PMM module monitoring . An expert in Flink, Kafka, and Spark Streaming, currently helping Intesa Sanpaolo on their journey of Flink adoption
Rozarta Caka Software Engineer Intesa Sanpaolo
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I am a Software Engineer with 6 years of experience in IT, specializing in developing applications for data streaming. I am an active contributor to Intesa Sanpaolo's Flink-based framework, 'SCRAT'. Previously, I served as a Team Lead and DevOps Engineer in the Gt Multicloud Management office.
Oleksii Pominovskyi IT Project manager Uniper
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Oleksii is an experienced IT Project manager with multi years background across various business and technical domains, as well as organizations and countries.
Currently leading projects ensuring stability and further optimization of the Sales&Trading IT business data flows in Uniper.
Sudha Ramraj Senior Technical Consultant Uniper
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Sudha is a technical expect, specializing on Integrations technologies as Apache Camel/Fuse, Kafka and Flink, as well as many other.
She has a tremendous portfolio of implemented cases in Uniper over the last 10 years, and is currently taking care of the architecture and design for Sales&Trading IT Integration solutions.
Jing Ge CTO & Apache Flink PMC Ververica
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Jing Ge, Head of Engineering at Ververica and Apache Flink® PMC, brings over 20 years of hands-on experience in software systems and cutting-edge streaming technologies. With a master's degree from TU Hamburg, his career includes notable roles at Ant Group and eBay leading full-stack data initiatives. At Ververica, he oversees engineering teams driving enterprise streaming data platform projects. Jing Ge's exceptional analytical skills and leadership make him a driving force in the field of big data technologies.
Feng Wang Senior Director Alibaba
Siddhartha Choudhury Senior Product Manager Booking.com
Mark Pybus Chief Data Officer Evoura
Erik Schmiegelow CEO Hivemind Technologies
Filip Yonov Head of Streaming Data Aiven
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Filip Yonov is the Head of Streaming Data at Aiven, where he oversees the Streaming Platform. With a rich background in product leadership, Filip specializes in cloud infrastructure, data streaming, and managed services. Throughout his career, Filip has contributed to the success of leading enterprise cloud companies, including ING, Booking.com, EY, IBM, and Docker, leveraging his expertise to enhance their product offerings and market position. Filip received his Masters of Science in Management from Rotterdam School of Management.
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