Alec Hothan is a Principal Engineer at Cisco, leading the platform modernization initiatives for the Cisco IoT division. In this role, Alec is at the forefront of migrating Cisco's IoT solutions to a new, advanced platform built on Kubernetes and a streaming architecture powered by Apache Pulsar. This transformation is aimed at enhancing the scalability, robustness, and efficiency of Cisco's IoT offerings. Prior to this, Alec was an Architect in the Cisco OpenStack platform and in Cisco's Routing and Switching group where he played a key role in the development and optimization of cloud infrastructure solutions and base infrastructure services.

Apurva Telang is a Staff Software Engineer in the Messaging and Streaming team at PayPal Inc. He and his team are responsible for building and maintaining PayPal's pubsub and real-time data transfer systems. His technical interests include building reliable and scalable distributed systems.

Aravind Suresh leads the real-time infrastructure team at OpenAI, where he builds large-scale streaming, real-time, and ML infrastructure that powers AI products like ChatGPT and Sora. Previously, he led infrastructure efforts at Uber to enable exabyte scale data analytics and AI initiatives across Rides, Eats, and Groceries. With over seven years of experience, Aravind specializes in designing and operating mission-critical, high-throughput data platforms for real-time analytics and machine learning systems.

A long builder of AI powered games, simulations, and collaborative user experiences, Ben has previously built a global logistics company, Large scale online games and Augmented reality apps. Ben is currently Field CTO at Ververica, working to make fast data and AI a reality for everyone.

David is a committer on the Apache Pulsar project, and also the author of Pulsar in Action and co-author of Practical Hive. He currently serves as a Developer Advocate for StreamNative where he focuses on strengthening the Apache Pulsar community through education and evangelization. Prior to that he was a principal software engineer on the messaging team at Splunk, and Director of Solutions for two Big Data startups; Streamlio and Hortonworks.

Denny Lee is a Developer Advocate at Databricks. He is a hands-on distributed systems and data sciences engineer with extensive experience developing internet-scale infrastructure, data platforms, and predictive analytics systems for both on-premise and cloud environments. He also has a Masters of Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health and Sciences University and has architected and implemented powerful data solutions for enterprise Healthcare customers. His current technical focuses include Distributed Systems, Apache Spark, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Genomics.

Gaurav Saxena is an established thought leader in the areas of cloud engineering, stream-based architectures, service mesh, observability, and AI. Gaurav is an Enterprise Architect with a strong technical background and over 20 years in the software industry.

Karthik Ramasamy is the Head of Streaming at Databricks. Before Databricks, he was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Splunk. Before Splunk, he was co-founder and CEO of Streamlio where he focused on building the next generation real time processing engine based on Apache Pulsar. He previously served as the engineering manager and technical lead for real-time analytics at Twitter where he co-created Twitter Heron. He has two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure, and networking. Karthik is the author of several publications, patents, and 'Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures'. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a focus on big data and databases.

Matteo is the CTO at StreamNative, where he brings rich experience in distributed pub-sub messaging platforms. Matteo was one of the co-creators of Apache Pulsar during his time at Yahoo!. Matteo and Sijie worked to create a global, distributed messaging system for Yahoo!, which would later become Apache Pulsar. Matteo then co-founded Streamlio with Guo, and later served as the Senior Principal Software Engineer at Splunk post-acquisition. Matteo is the PMC Chair of Apache Pulsar, where he helps to guide the community and ensure the success of the Pulsar project. He is also a PMC member for Apache BookKeeper. Matteo lives in Menlo Park, California.

Mingmin is director of engineering and head of real-time data and search platform at Uber. He has been leading the team to build and operate Kafka infrastructure to power tens of trillions messages per day, and streaming processing platform to power thousands streaming jobs per day. His team builds highly scalable, highly reliable yet efficient data infrastructure with innovative ideas while leveraging many open-source technologies such as OpenSearch, Kafka, Flink, Pinot etc. He got his PhD in computer science from UC Davis.

I'm an experienced Engineering Manager and former Staff Engineer at Intuit Credit Karma, where I lead teams building the streaming online data platform and data frameworks that power our AI-driven recommendations for 110M+ users.

Sujay Jain is a technology architect and engineering leader specializing in large-scale distributed systems and real-time data platforms at Microsoft, Meta, and Netflix. At Netflix, his work on streaming data technologies and platform architecture has fundamentally transformed how the company processes and analyzes real-time data, powering applications that serve hundreds of millions of users globally. A recognized thought leader in the distributed systems community, Sujay regularly speaks at international conferences and contributes to technical discourse through publications and industry forums. He is passionate about mentoring emerging technologists and advancing industry best practices in stream processing and scalable system architecture. His expertise spans from low-level system optimization to strategic platform vision, making him a sought-after voice in modern data infrastructure evolution.

Tirtha specializes in distributed data systems and has extensive experience building and managing very large-scale streaming infrastructure. He is currently a tech lead on the Valkey team at Apple. Before working at Apple, he was a Staff Engineer on the pub-sub and streaming team at Linkedin, where he worked on Apache Kafka and helped build Northguard - Linkedin’s next-generation streaming backbone. Before that, he was a founding engineer on the Managed Streaming for Kafka team at AWS.

Yingjun Wu is the founder of RisingWave Labs, a series-A startup building RisingWave, a distributed SQL database for stream processing. Before running the company, he was a software engineer at the Redshift team, Amazon Web Services, and a researcher at the Database group, IBM Almaden Research Center. He received my PhD degree from National University of Singapore (advisor: Kian-Lee Tan), and was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon University (host advisor: Andrew Pavlo).