Flink Forward
Flink Forward

Seattle 2023

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.

Agenda
Flink Forward

Speakers

Hunter Medney

Technical lead for Digital Growth
@ IBM

Industry-awarded senior architect/engineer in customer data platforms and event-driven systems. Hunter currently leads IBM's digital growth platform and is exploring the wonders and power of Apache Flink.

Basar Hamdi Onat

Software Engineer
@ DoorDash

Basar Onat is an accomplished software engineer specializing in realtime streaming platforms. Currently at DoorDash, he works as a Software Engineer on the Real-Time Platform team, focusing on the Realtime Metrics Platform. Basar has also contributed significantly as a Software Engineer at Meta, handling large-scale data workloads with the Presto team. Prior to that, he played a vital role in bootstrapping the Realtime Platform at Striim. With his expertise, Basar brings valuable insights to the Flink Forward Conference, sharing his knowledge in building robust realtime streaming platforms.

Sharon Xie

Founding Engineer
@ Decodable

Sharon has been building and maintaining streaming data platforms for over 6 years. She is a founding engineer at Decodable and leads the data platform development. Before Decodable, she was a tech lead of the real-time data platform at Splunk focusing on the query language and developer SDKs.

Dan Vinakovsky

Lead Software Engineer
@ Schonfeld

Operations technology software engineer at Schonfeld by day, Olympic Weightlifting competitor by night

Allison Cheng

Software Engineer
@ DoorDash

Allison Cheng is a software engineer on the realtime platform team at DoorDash. Her team is responsible for providing the data ingestion platform for data users to capture, access and create real time insights. Before DoorDash, Allison was at Amazon on the Listing Management team, building the near realtime high volume data ingestion pipelines for sellers. Outside of work, She enjoys cooking for family and friends. She also started to try beginner hiking trails and biking

Prateek Shukla

Sr Manager Software Engineering
@ JP MorganChase

Prateek works at JP MorganChase Retail line of business and runs a streaming platform that enables quality insights across hundreds of customer facing applications.

Erik de Nooij

Engineering lead Streaming Data Analytics
@ ING Bank

Seasoned Tech Lead with a background in various industries like retail, telecom, tech, and banking, in various roles like engineering, consultancy, and management. Has worked on Apache Flink within ING since its inception in 2016, helping it grow towards the de facto standard for streaming at ING worldwide.

Pradyot Patil

Data Engineer
@ ING Bank

Pradyot is a Data Engineer with a passion for developing innovative solutions to complex problems at ING Analytics, Amsterdam. He has worked on projects in the field of data science & software development and in his current role focused on streaming data analytics. Pradyot also co-presented an open-source Python library called "popmon" at SciPy 2022.

Jark Wu

Staff Software Engineer
@ Alibaba Cloud

Jark Wu is a committer and PMC member of Apache Flink. He works as a software engineer at Alibaba and contributes to Apache Flink since 4 years ago. In Flink, he is mainly working on the Table & SQL API. Prior to Flink, Jark worked on JStorm which is a Java-version Apache Storm in Alibaba.

Rashmi Shamsundar

Software Engineer
@ Block

Rashmi is a software engineer currently working at CashApp (Block). She has more than 10 years of experience building great products for a wide range of industries. More recently, she is working on the platform teams building and maintaining data platforms. When not working, Rashmi is into Yoga, learning the Violin and loves spending time with her family.

Jasmin Soltani

Software Engineer
@ Bloomberg LP

Jasmin Soltani is a software engineer at Bloomberg, where she is focused on building real-time, high-throughput data pipelines. She holds a degree in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. After starting her career in operations, she realized the power of technology and made her transition into tech in 2020. She is passionate about mentorship and a culture of life-long learning. Outside of tech, Jasmin enjoys making ceramics and eating her way around New York City.

Dong Lin

Staff Software Engineer
@ Alibaba / Apache Flink & Kafka PMC

Dong Lin is a Staff Software Engineer at Alibaba working on Apache Flink ecosystem projects. He is the architect and primary maintainer of FeatHub and Flink ML. Dong is also a member of Apache Flink and Apache Kafka PMC.

Ramkrishna Vasudevan

Principal Software Engineer
@ Microsoft

Managing the streaming team in Azure HDInsight.

Da Huo

Software Engineer
@ Bloomberg LP

Da Huo is a software engineer in the Fixed Income Pricing team at Bloomberg. He focuses on building low-latency and high-throughput real-time pricing pipelines. Outside of tech, he enjoys freediving and snowboarding.

Divye Kapoor

Senior Staff Software Engineer
@ Pinterest, Inc.

Divye came to the SF Bay Area 12 years ago, delivering Tweet results on the Google Search Results Page. At LinkedIn he delivered Comment Relevance on LinkedIn's Feed. These days, he's working on Pinterest's Stream Processing Platform (Xenon) built on Flink.

Hongyue Zhang

Data Focused
@ Apple

Hongyue started his career developing micro services in AWS to help schedule the serverless containers at scale. His journey with data started in 2021, and he immediately became the fan of the Apache Iceberg project. At Apple, Hongyue is building tools and systems around Apache Iceberg to help make data-driven decisions.

Jaydeep Karia

Engineering Team Lead, Cloud Native Streaming Analytics Platform
@ Bloomberg

Jaydeep Karia is a Team Lead in the Cloud Native Compute Services Engineering group at Bloomberg. His team is responsible for developing and maintaining a cloud native streaming analytics platform. They are focused on providing a managed Apache Flink offering within the firm. He has worked at Bloomberg for more than 12 years, after earning his master's degree in computer engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (now Virginia Tech).

Konstantin Gizdarski

ML Engineering
@ Lyft

Konstantin is an engineer at Lyft where he has worked on expanding the company's capabilities in machine learning. Originally from Bulgaria, Konstantin grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Northeastern in Boston as an undergraduate.

Yuan Mei

Flink PMC, TL of Flink Storage, Architect of Flink Engine
@ Alibaba

Yuan Mei is an Apache Flink PMC member and leads the Flink Storage team at Ververica (Alibaba). She also acts as an architect of Flink Engine. Before joining Ververica (Alibaba), she was a research scientist at Facebook. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL.

Varun Sayal

Senior Software Engineer
@ Bloomberg LP

Varun Sayal is a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, where he leads the development of high-volume, real-time distributed stream processing systems. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Stony Brook University. He is passionate about solving hard problems collaboratively and creating an efficient, but fun, work environment. Outside of work, Varun likes to play basketball and guitar, and he enjoys wandering New York City's streets to see what he discovers.

Nijel S F

Principal Product Manager
@ Microsoft

Nijel works as a product manager in Microsoft analytics domain. Have good experience in big data technologies and system architecture. Part of many big project deployments and owned the technical architecture. Also being with open-source domain for more than 12 years.

Sairam Yeturi

Principal Product Manager
@ Microsoft

Sairam leads the streaming product management for Azure HDInsight and owns the key open-source streaming projects such as Kafka and Flink. He has been focused on building products focused on analytics, machine learning, computer vision, real time stream processing, and artificial intelligence over the last several years. He brings rich experience in solution space of analytics, product management and industry expertise on large scale product development alongside imparting design thinking practices.

Heng Zhang

Software enginee
@ Pinterest

Heng is a software engineer building large scale data ingestion and stream processing platforms at Pinterest

Karel Alfonso Sague

Senior Software Engineer in the Data Platform team
@ Block

Karel is a software engineer currently working at CashApp (Block) in the Data Platform team. He enjoys the challenges of working in infrastructure applied to data engineering. Karel has more than 20 years experience in the IT industry. He has shared his knowledge in multiple conferences: Voxxed Days Australia, Hadoop Summit and local community events. Prior to working at Block he worked as a consultant for ThoughtWorks across multiple industries. Outside of work Karel loves spending time with his family, hiking, bike riding and dancing.

Sergey Nuyanzin


@ Aiven

After several years in enterprise with Oracle switched to open source bigdata and self-healing systems.

Zhu Zhu

Apache Flink Committer & PMC member, Senior Engineer
@ Alibaba Cloud

Zhu is an Apache Flink Committer and PMC member, and a Senior Engineer at Alibaba Cloud. Zhu mainly focuses on the job coordination and execution of Apache Flink. Before Alibaba, he worked at Microsoft on shared data platform.

Weiqing Yang

Software engineer
@ LinkedIn

Weiqing has been working in big data computation frameworks since 2015. She has contributed to Apache Spark/HBase/Hadoop/Samza. She is currently a software engineer in Streaming Infra team at LinkedIn, working on Flink, Samza, K8s, etc. Before that, she worked in Spark team at Hortonworks. Weiqing enjoys speaking at conferences. She presented in Spark Summit 2017, HBaseCon 2017, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, ApacheCon 2020 and Flink Forward San Francisco 2022.

Gyula Fora

Apache Flink PMC, Software Engineer
@ Apple

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.

Xintong Song

Apache Flink PMC Member, Staff Software Engineer
@ Alibaba

Xintong is an Apache Flink PMC member. He is also a Staff Software Engineer and leads the Flink Shuffle & SDK team at Alibaba. Prior to that, he received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Peking University.

Marton Balassi

Engineering Manager
@ Apple

Marton Balassi is a Flink PMC member and a Engineer Manager at Apple. He is one of the original authors of the Flink Streaming API. In previous roles he worked directly with more than 50 customers to guide their journey of distributed data processing. Most recently before joining Apple Marton led the Flink Engineering team at Cloudera.

Aleksei Statkevich

Engineering Leader
@ TikTok

Aleksei is an Engineering Manager at TikTok leading Data Ingestion and Integration teams. He specializes in solving technical challenges at a large scale in the areas of data infrastructure and distributed systems. Before joining TikTok, Aleksei was a Founding Engineer at a self-driving startup and a member of the Presto team at Meta, where he extended Presto to solve low-latency OLAP use cases on petabytes of data. He also served as a Senior Rocket Scientist and Engineering Manager at Rocket Fuel, where he worked on the Data Platform and Infrastructure.

Sergio Chong Loo

Lead Software Engineer
@ Apple

Sergio is a Lead Software Engineer at Apple Maps Infrastructure. His expertise includes System Architecture, Microservices (SaaS/PaaS) and Databases. He’s currently focused on Data Streaming/Analytics pipelines on the Cloud with Flink, Iceberg and Scala. Before Apple he worked on building Services for the Energy and Utilities Trading Market, and he helped built a national network of LP Gas stations in Mexico prior to that. Aside from work he’s a guitar player and music production enthusiast.

Niharika Sakuru

Software Engineer
@ Bloomberg LP

Niharika Sakuru is a Software Engineer at Bloomberg who is currently adulting in Jersey City. She is part of the Compliance Engineering org, working in the team that owns stream processing applications that surveil real-time communication. At the moment, she is working on enhancing the performance of streaming applications. Niharika is a member of the company’s Distributed Systems Guild and Bloomberg’s Women in Technology (BWIT) community. Outside of work, Niharika loves dancing, yoga, traveling, animals, and chocolates.

Liang Mou

Software Engineer
@ Pinterest

Large scale data/infra at Pinterest since 2022. TL @ Lyft data platform team from 2018 to 2022.

Shahid Chohan

Infrastructure Engineer
@ Stripe

Shahid Chohan is a software engineer on Stripe’s Streaming team where he works on a number of real-time data infrastructure initiatives, including operating Flink as a platform for Stripe’s engineers. Prior to joining Stripe, Shahid worked on change-data-capture, real-time data-warehousing, and real-time experimentation systems at Yelp.

Maximilian Michels

Flink PMC / Software Enginee
@ Apple

Max is a software engineer at Apple who loves stream processing and Flink. Concurrent algorithms and distributed systems were his favorite subjects at university. 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. In his free time, Max listens to Jazz music and plays the guitar.

Tejeswar Das

Software Enginee
@ Apple

I currently work at Apple, building distributing data pipelines using Flink. I am passionate about building reliable and distributed data systems at scale.

Vikas Mallapura

Senior software engineer
@ Datadog

Vikas Mallapura is a senior software engineer at Datadog. He works on the stream processing systems in Datadog. Prior to working at Datadog, he was a software engineer at AWS and received his master’s degree in computer science from UIUC.

Vignesh Raja

Senior software engineer
@ Reddit

Vignesh is a Software Engineer on the Safety team at Reddit where he works on realtime systems to scalably curb abuse on the site, using technologies like Flink and Kafka. Before Reddit, he worked on distributed systems at Optimizely. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Nadine Farah

Dev rel / Apache Hudi contributor
@ onehouse

Nadine Farah is leading Onehouse's developer initiatives. She's passionate about bridging engineering, product & marketing to help drive product adoption. She previously led Rockset's developer initiatives, focusing on building technical content to drive developer adoption for real-time analytics. At Bose, she contributed to the watchOS SDK & worked with partners to embrace spatial audio in the music and gaming industries.

Haizhou Zhao

Software Engineer
@ Apple

Haizhou has dedicated his time to dev and ops of secured catalogs for Iceberg tables. Particularly, he focuses on building authentication and authorization solutions on top of Iceberg table cataloging operations. Prior to joining Apple, Haizhou worked as an software engineer at AWS developing software defined networking solutions.

Jingsong Li

Staff Engineer
@ Alibaba

Jingsong is a PPMC member of Apache Paimon, a PMC member of Apache Flink, is a staff engineer at Alibaba. 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. Since 2021, he has focused on Streaming Lakehouse, founded Apache Paimon (Flink Table Store), promoting Paimon's related development.

Krzysztof Zarzycki

CTO
@ GetInData | Xebia Data

Krzysztof is the co-founder and CTO of GetInData | Part of Xebia. Armed with a major in Computer Science from Warsaw University, he has spent 15 years paving the way in the field of software, big data and AI. Krzysztof has worked in a range of roles, including engineer, to architect and consultant, which have led him to current position as CTO. Krzysztof is passionate about the latest innovations in the data world, especially obsessed with advances around real-time processing, MLOps and AI brining the real business value.

Alex Thomas

Senior Software Engineer
@ VMware

ML Eng @ VMware Carbonblack, focusing on building low cost, scalable ML streaming pipelines with Apache Flink

Seth Saperstein

Software Engineer
@ Lyft

Seth is a Software Engineer on the Streaming Platform team at Lyft. The team is responsible for building the infrastructure to support Flink, Beam, and Kafka. He is passionate about large scale distributed systems, big data, and real-time systems.

Shipeng Xie

Software Engineer
@ VMware

Software Engineer @ VMware Carbon Black, focusing on data engineering and infra with Flink, as well as microservice development.

Taruj Goyal

Software Engineer
@ VMware

Software Engineer @ VMware Carbon Black, focusing on data engineering and infra with Flink, as well as microservice development.

Jerome Gagnon

Principal Software Developer
@ Wealthsimple

Jerome Gagnon is a principal software developer for the Risk Engineering teams at Wealthsimple, combining Fraud and Credit Risk. Jerome brings years of technical experience in Fraud detection, distributed, data processing and streaming systems and cloud-computing infrastructure. Jerome has a proven track record of technical leadership of cross-functional engineering teams. Jerome has a software engineering undergrad from the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal. He is passionate about technology and finance.

Tejas Budukh

Staff Software Developer
@ VMware

Software engineer working on distributed systems and cybersecurity.

Gunnar Morling

Senior Staff Software Engineer
@ Decodable

Gunnar Morling is a software engineer and open-source enthusiast by heart, currently working at Decodable on stream processing 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 a wide range of conferences like QCon, Java One, and Devoxx. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Jun Qin

Head of Solutions Architecture
@ Ververica

Jun Qin is Head of Solutions Architecture at Ververica. Previously, he worked a Solutions Architect & Technical Account Manager at Ververica, as a Technical Account Manager in MapR and as a senior system support programmer/analyst in Amadeus. He has a Ph.D. in computer science and specializes in distributed computing and system architecture.

Asimansu Bera

Product Solution Architect
@ Ververica

I am, Asimansu Bera, graduated from IU ,Bloomington, in Data Science in 2016. and Master in Engineering from Calcutta, India in 2000. As a Solution Architect, I helped many enterprise customers solving complex Application and optimization challenges. I joined Ververica In September 2022 as Product Solution Architect helping many enterprises adopt Stream processing using Apache Flink technology. I currently live in Sunnyvale with my family. In leisure, I love to spend time with my son and wife and also love to travel. My hobbies are playing Chess, Cooking, Watching movies, and Cricket.

Ali Zeybek

Team Lead Solutions Architect
@ Ververica

Team Lead Solutions Architect with a background in building Data and ML Platforms for organisations from different sectors

Allen Wang

Tech lead
@ DoorDash

Allen Wang is currently a tech lead at data platform at DoorDash. He is the architect for the Iguazu event processing system and a founding member of the real time streaming platform team. Prior to joining DoorDash, he was a lead in the real time data infrastructure team at Netflix where he created the Kafka infrastructure for Netflix’s Keystone data pipeline and was a main contributor to shape the Kafka ecosystem at Netflix.

Rajasekhar Konda

Engineering Manager in AI/ML Data Platform
@ Apple

Raj works for Apple as an Engineering Manager for Data Platform and ML Infra focused on providing Data LakeHouse solutions for Machine Learning and Data Engineering use cases. Raj has expertise in building large scale highly reliable distributed systems using cloud and open source technologies.

Jeremy Ber

Senior Solutions Architect
@ Amazon Web Services

Jeremy Ber has been working in the telemetry data space for the past 9 years as a Software Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, and most recently a Data Engineer. At AWS, he is a Streaming Specialist Solutions Architect, supporting both Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and AWS’s managed offering for Apache Flink.

Ali Alemi

Streaming Specialist Solutions Architect
@ Amazon Web Services

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.

Hong Teoh

Software Development Engineer
@ Amazon Web Services

Hong is a Software Development Engineer working on the managed Flink platform at AWS. The team builds and supports the infrastructure that enables customers to spin up long running Flink jobs without worrying about maintaining the underlying Flink cluster. Recently, he has been spending time deep diving on and resolving common issues faced by customers on the platform. In his free time, he enjoys nerding out on streaming processing frameworks (Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Apache Beam, etc.) to understand why they were designed that way.

Danny Cranmer

Apache Flink Committer & Principal Engineer
@ Amazon Web Services

I am a Principal Engineer at Amazon AWS working on the Kinesis Data Analytics platform. We provide a fully managed platform for Apache Flink jobs. I also enjoy contributing to open source projects and am an Apache Flink PMC member

Tzu-Li (Gordon) Tai

Apache Flink PMC, Staff Software Engineer
@ Confluent

Tzu-Li (Gordon) Tai is a Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, and a long-time Apache Flink Committer and PMC member. At Confluent, he is currently focusing on making Flink and Kafka work really well together. His past contributions in Flink spans various areas, including the Stateful Functions subproject (https://statefun.io), some of the more popular connectors for Flink (Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.), as well as several topics surrounding evolvability of stateful Flink streaming applications.

Panagiotis Garefalakis

Software engineer
@ Confluent

Panagiotis Garefalakis is a Software Engineer at Confluent where he is part of the Flink runtime team. He’s spent the last several years working on open-source big data systems and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Imperial College London where he was affiliated with the Large-Scale Data & Systems (LSDS) group. His interests lie within the broad area of systems including large-scale distributed systems, big data processing, resource management and streaming.

Nagesh Honnalli

Principal Software Engineer
@ Amazon Managed Service

Nagesh Honnalli is a Principal Software Engineer at Amazon Managed service for Apache Flink (Amazon MSF). His primary focus is fault tolerant distributed systems and he is currently building a highly available platform for managing Flink jobs on Amazon MSF. In his time at AWS, Nagesh has launched multiple products including Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and Amazon MSF that continue to delight AWS customers.

Anjali Mangal

Director Data Science /ML Platform
@ VMware

Anjali is Director of Engineering at VMware and Head of Data science and ML org in Security Business unit . She and her team work on petabytes scale of events and alerts to automate security at scale using Data science , statistics and machine learning.

Ben Augarten

Software Engineer
@ Stripe

Ben Augarten works as a software engineer at Stripe providing a managed Flink runtime. Previously, he worked on stream processing as a service at Splunk and filtering Twitter's firehose against billions of custom rules with GNIP. Ben is most interested in stateful, very low-latency streaming applications and making real time data processing more widely accessible.

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