-
Adam Richardson
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI
Adam Richardson is the tech lead for the Realtime Infrastructure team at OpenAI. OpenAI's Realtime Infrastructure team supports hundreds of Kafka and Flink use cases across the entire organization. Previously, Adam was the tech lead for the Data Movement team at Stripe, building and managing ELT pipelines at petabyte scale.
- Company
- OpenAI
- Title
- Member of Technical Staff
-
Alex Merced
Co-Author of O'Reilly's "Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide"
Alex Merced is Head of DevRel for Dremio and co-author of "Apache Iceberg: The definitive guide" from O'reilly and has worked as a developer and instructor for companies like GenEd Systems, Crossfield Digital, CampusGuard and General Assembly.
Alex is passionate about technology and has put out tech content on outlets such as blogs, videos and his podcasts Datanation and Web Dev 101. Alex Merced has contributed a variety of libraries in the Javascript & Python worlds including SencilloDB, CoquitoJS, dremio-simple-query and more.- Company
- Dremio
- Title
- Head of DevRel
-
Alexander Gallego
Founder and CEO, Redpanda
Alex Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data. He created Redpanda in 2019 with the vision of making real-time data accessible to all developers. Alex engineered the first version of the Redpanda platform from the ground up for low latency, large scale, and a simpler, better user experience.
Prior to Redpanda, Alex was the co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream-processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. Following the acquisition, Alex served as a principal engineer at Akamai, where he led the effort to build a next-gen virtualization platform.
Alex began his career as a hacker and builder in his hometown of Manizales, Colombia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU.- Company
- Redpanda
- Title
- Founder and CEO
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Amrit Sarkar
Engineer at Salesforce Inc.
Amrit Sarkar, 8 years experienced engineer, working in Search and Big Data domain.
- Company
- Salesforce Inc
- Title
- Lead Member of Technical Staff
-
Andriy Vityuk
Google - BigQuery Software Engineer
Andriy Vityuk is a Software Engineer at Google with a decade of experience in large-scale data systems. For the past four years, he has been a core member of the BigQuery team, currently contributing to the development of Continuous Query execution to enable real-time insights from streaming data. He previously worked on time series analysis in BigQuery. Andriy's technical interests revolve around designing and building robust real-time big data systems.
- Company
- Title
- Software Engineer
-
Aravind Suresh
Member of Technical Staff @ OpenAI
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.
- Company
- OpenAI
- Title
- Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineering)
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Ashwin Raja
Ashwin Raja is the Co-Founder & CTO of Motorq, a leading SaaS company transforming connected car data into actionable insights. With over two decades in technology, he has built world-class engineering teams and scalable platforms at Microsoft, HBO, and multiple startups. At Motorq, Ashwin drives AI-powered telemetry solutions that help global customers unlock efficiencies and create new business models. A champion of innovation, ownership mindset, and mentorship, he has grown Motorq’s development centers into industry models. Ashwin is passionate about nurturing the next generation of tech leaders while delivering impactful solutions for the automotive and mobility ecosystem.
- Company
- Motorq
- Title
- Co-Founder & CTO
-
Balu Kunju
Manager, Software Development @ Paypal
Balu Kunju serves as Manager of Software Development at PayPal, where he leads the messaging infrastructure team and drives the company's strategic migration from legacy messaging platforms to the next-generation Apache Pulsar ecosystem.
At PayPal, Balu spearheads the end-to-end design, architecture, and operationalization of Apache Pulsar for enterprise-scale messaging and streaming workloads. Under his leadership, the team has successfully containerized and automated the entire Pulsar platform lifecycle using Kubernetes operators, executed seamless production migrations with zero downtime, and established Pulsar as PayPal's unified messaging backbone supporting hundreds of producers and consumers across the global enterprise.
With a Master's in Computer Science and over 20+ years of distributed systems experience, Balu is recognized for his customer-centric leadership approach and has received multiple awards for technical excellence and collaborative innovation. He actively contributes to the Apache Pulsar open-source community and participates in industry summits to advance streaming technologies. His work directly enables PayPal's ability to process high-throughput financial transactions while maintaining data integrity and system reliability at global scale.- Company
- Paypal
- Title
- Manager, Software Development
-
Bonnie Varghese
Software Engineer @ Confluent
Bonnie Varghese is a Software Engineer at Confluent where he is part of the Flink SQL & Metastore team. He’s spent the last several years working on open-source big data systems and leveraged streaming systems like Ksql, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and Kafka Streams to build data pipelines. His interests lie within the broad area of systems including large-scale distributed systems and stream processing.
- Company
- Confluent
- Title
- Software Engineer
-
Chaitanya Deepthi Chadalavada
StarTree, Software Engineer
Deepthi is a Senior Software Engineer at StarTree, where she has extensively worked on Upserts and Deduplication in Apache Pinot, addressing real-time data challenges at scale. She is very passionate about contributing to open-source projects and engaging with Data Engineering community. She holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Purdue University.
- Company
- StarTree
- Title
- Senior Software Engineer I
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Christos Anagnostakis
Enterprise Architect
Christos is an Enterprise Architect with over 20 years of experience in the software industry and particularly Data Streaming technologies, Stream Processing, Streaming Databases and last, but not least, Lisp.
- Company
- Toyota
- Title
- Enterprise Architect
-
Connor McKee
Professional Services at Antithesis
Connor McKee is a Professional Services Manager at Antithesis (https://antithesis.com/). He and his team work with customers to get the most value from autonomous testing.
- Company
- Antithesis
- Title
- Professional Services Manager
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David Kjerrumgaard
Committer on the Apache Pulsar Project | Published Author | International Speaker | Big Data Expert
David is a globally recognized expert in the world of real-time data, messaging systems, and Big Data technologies. He is a distinguished committer on the Apache Pulsar project, showcasing his invaluable contributions to the advancement of this groundbreaking event streaming platform.
As an accomplished author, David has penned the highly regarded book "Pulsar in Action," which serves as a definitive guide for those seeking to master the intricacies of Apache Pulsar. He is also a co-author of "Practical Hive," adding to his list of notable publications.
With numerous speaking engagements around the world, David's influence and expertise extend far beyond his written work. His captivating and informative talks have enlightened audiences on a global scale, making him a sought-after authority on topics related to real-time data and messaging technologies.
In his current role as a Developer Advocate for StreamNative, David focuses on strengthening the Apache Pulsar community through his passion for education and evangelization. He is dedicated to empowering individuals and organizations with the knowledge and skills they need to make the most of real-time data and messaging technologies.
Prior to his role at StreamNative, David held key positions in leading companies. He was a principal software engineer on the messaging team at Splunk, where he honed his expertise in real-time data analytics. Additionally, David has served as the Director of Solutions for two influential Big Data startups, Streamlio and Hortonworks, further solidifying his position as a thought leader in the industry.
David's extensive experience, contributions to open-source projects, commitment to educating and supporting the community, and his extensive international speaking engagements make him a prominent figure in the field of real-time data. His presentations are always enlightening and serve as a valuable resource for those navigating the complexities of modern data and messaging systems.- Company
- StreamNative
- Title
- Principal Sales Engineer
-
Dustin Nest
StreamNative Technical Trainer
Dustin Nest specializes in the creation of engaging technical training content and is StreamNative's full-time Technical Trainer. He brings to StreamNative ten years of experience in software technical support, debugging, and training content development. He has both a BS and PhD in Chemical Engineering, with additional training and experience in C++, C#, Java, JS, and React. Dustin is excited to be your guide as you learn how to build scalable messaging and streaming applications.
- Company
- Ververica
- Title
- Senior Technical Trainer
-
Hang Chen
StreamNative
Hang Chen, Apache Pulsar PMC member. He focuses on the Pulsar storage module, including BookKeeper, tiered storage, and Lakehouse integration.
- Company
- StreamNative
- Title
- Director of Storage
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Jan Siekierski
Data Streaming consultant, Kentra
My primary background is in building JVM applications in Java and Kotlin, 5 of which leading teams building event-driven applications.
Today I'm trying to move the Data Streaming industry forward through content creation, training workshops and advisory consulting.- Company
- Kentra
- Title
- Data Streaming consultant
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Jorge Rodriguez
Netflix, Senior Software Engineer
Jorge Rodriguez is a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Movement Engines team at Netflix. During the past 4 years, he's been contributing to the Apache Kafka and Flink platforms to enable realtime data processing at Netflix.
- Company
- Netflix
- Title
- Senior Software Engineer
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Karthikeyan K
Technical Lead Engineer at Motorq
Karthikeyan is a Technical Lead at Motorq, specializing in real-time data streaming and building robust, scalable systems to support high-throughput analytics.
He leads the design and optimization of low-latency, fault-tolerant data pipelines and drives improvements in code quality to accelerate product development.- Company
- Motorq
- Title
- Technical Lead Engineer
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Kundan Vyas
Staff Product Manager @ StreamNative
Kundan Vyas is a Staff Product Manager at StreamNative, leading Product and Partner Strategy across data streaming, stream processing, and open data lakehouse formats. He drives StreamNative Cloud’s Lakehouse Storage integrations with Unity Catalog, Iceberg REST Catalog, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg while overseeing the compute platform for Connectors, Functions, and Apache Flink. He also collaborates with ISV partners to expand StreamNative’s ecosystem. Previously, Kundan led product strategy for data integration and streaming cloud services at Oracle, Cisco, and Confluent.
- Company
- StreamNative
- Title
- Staff Product Manager
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Lari Hotari
StreamNative, Principal Software Engineer
Lari Hotari is an Apache Pulsar committer and PMC member. He is a distributed systems software engineer and architect with 25+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems. He is also a recognized open source contributor with 5000+ commits in major projects like Apache Pulsar, Apache Bookkeeper, Grails, Groovy, Spring Framework, Spring Boot and Gradle.
- Company
- StreamNative
- Title
- Principal Software Engineer
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Lawrie Green
Antithesis
Lawrie works with Antithesis customers to help them make the most of their testing on the Antithesis platform.
- Company
- Antithesis
- Title
- Senior Consultrant
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Matteo Merli
Pulsar PMC Chair - CTO StreamNative
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 worked to create a global, distributed messaging system for Yahoo!, which would later become Apache Pulsar. 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.
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Meraj Bhawani
Director of Engineering - Blueshift
Meraj Bhawani currently leads the platform engineering team at Blueshift, overseeing search and segmentation, distributed databases, profile unification, and data streaming infrastructure that power Blueshift's AI-driven customer engagement platform. He specializes in distributed systems, data streaming, cloud-native microservices architecture, modern cloud storage, and search technologies with proven experience managing large-scale cloud-based products and infrastructure under stringent SLAs for reliability, availability, and performance. Meraj is passionate about driving innovation within the enterprise SaaS space. He has successfully led two major products end-to-end from inception through to enterprise-level operations delivering significant business impact.
- Company
- Blueshift Inc
- Title
- Director of Engineering
-
Michelle Leon
Staff Product Manager, Databricks
Michelle is a product manager at Databricks, working on all things open lakehouse (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Iceberg). She previously led teams at Webflow and Airbnb, and is based out of San Francisco.
- Company
- Databricks
- Title
- Staff Product Manager
-
Mingmin Chen
Director of Engineering and Head of Real-Time Data and Search Platform
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.
- Company
- Uber
- Title
- Director of Engineering and Head of Real-Time Data and Search Platform
-
Mingyu Chen
Apache Doris PMC Chair
Apache Doris PMC Chair. 10 years of experience in distributed system, focusing on distributed scalable analytical databases.
- Company
- VeloDB
- Title
- Co-Founder & VP of Engineering
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Naci Simsek
Ververica, Customer Success Manager
Naci Simsek is a Customer Success Manager at Ververica with over 17 years of experience in IT and Telecom. He began his career as a Customer Support Engineer at Nortel Networks, advancing through roles as Software Engineer, Engineering Team Lead, Project Manager, and Solutions Architect at Huawei. Over nearly a decade, he specialized in customer-facing big data solutions as a Platform Engineer, BI Engineer, and Data Engineer. In his current position, he supports customers in leveraging Apache Flink for real-time data streaming across on-premises and cloud environments.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Ege University, an MBA from Bahcesehir University, and the PMP® certification.- Company
- Ververica
- Title
- Senior Customer Success Manager
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Naresh Kumar Kotha
Credit Karma, Engineering Manager 2
As the Engineering Manager with over 15 years of experience overseeing the Online Data Platform, Data Frameworks, and Behavioral Tracking Platform teams , I lead strategic initiatives that build scalable, efficient data systems powering AI and machine learning-driven recommendation platforms. My hands-on technical expertise and strong leadership skills have enabled me to seamlessly transition from staff-level engineering to management, consistently driving innovation and delivering impactful, high-value solutions.
I have a proven track record in designing high-throughput, low-latency systems using Kafka, Akka Streams, and Spark, which power real-time, mission-critical AI and machine learning applications. My expertise extends across the full lifecycle of data pipelines that fuel machine learning models, including Kafka, Google Dataflow, Spark Streaming, Akka Streams, BigTable, and BigQuery. Additionally, I have designed and developed ETL systems (PHP, Go, Scala) to streamline data ingestion for advanced analytics and AI algorithms.
In the realm of AI, I’ve contributed to the architecture and deployment of machine learning systems that enhance Credit Karma's recommendation engines and data-driven products. By optimizing data platforms for AI inference pipelines, I ensure scalable, low-latency access to the high-quality data needed for machine learning models.- Company
- Credit Karma
- Title
- Engineering Manager 2
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Neng Lu
StreamNative, Director of Engineering
Neng Lu is a founding member and Director of Engineering at StreamNative, where he leads the development of the StreamNative Cloud Platform and the next-generation Ursa engine. As an Apache Pulsar Committer, he focuses on advancing Pulsar Functions and IO Connectors, driving the evolution of real-time data streaming systems.
Prior to StreamNative, Neng was a Senior Software Engineer at Twitter, where he worked on distributed stream processing technologies. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA and a B.S. from Zhejiang University.- Company
- StreamNative
- Title
- Director of Engineering
-
Nick Orlove
Google - BigQuery Product Manager
Nick Orlove is a BigQuery product manager, focused on making data and insights available to customers in real-time. He's been at Google for >8 years and in his off time focuses on his 1 year old daughter, running, wood working, and the great outdoors.
- Company
- Title
- Product Manager
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Nicolas Joseph
Co Founder and CTO at Fiveonefour
Nicolas Joseph is a senior engineering leader specializing in data platforms and analytics at scale. With years of experience architecting high-throughput OLTP services and end-to-end OLAP pipelines, he’s solved thorny problems around schema drift, performance bottlenecks, and cross-team governance. As the founder of the open-source project Moose, Nicolas champions adaptive schema contracts that keep data reliable and auditable from source systems through BI dashboards. He’s passionate about clean abstractions, automated governance, and building resilient systems that evolve alongside today’s fast-moving businesses.
- Company
- Fiveonefour
- Title
- CTO, Co Founder
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Onur Karaman
Onur is a Sr Staff Engineer at LinkedIn with an interest in distributed systems. He's the tech lead of Northguard, a log storage system with a focus on scalability and operability. Prior to Northguard, Onur was a committer to Apache Kafka, where he focused on Kafka's scalability. He redesigned the cluster's controller, made the controller use ZooKeeper's async APIs, and worked on the group coordinator and consumer group management protocol.
- Company
- Title
- Northguard tech lead
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PengHui Li
Director of Streaming at StreamNative, Apache Pulsar PMC Member/Committer
Penghui Li is passionate about helping organizations to architect and implement messaging services. Prior to StreamNative, Penghui was a Software Engineer at Zhaopin.com, where he was the leading Pulsar advocate and helped the company adopt and implement the technology
- Company
- streamnative.io
- Title
- Director of Streaming
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Ram Alagappan
Lead of Distributed and Storage Systems Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ram Alagappan is an Assistant Professor at UIUC, where he co-leads the Distributed And Storage Systems Lab (DASSL). His research focuses on storage systems, disaggregated memory, and distributed systems. His work has appeared at OSDI, SOSP, FAST, and EuroSys. He has won several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, teaching recognitions at UIUC, and best-paper awards at SOSP '24, FAST '20, FAST '18, and FAST '17. His open-source tools have had a practical impact, exposing more than 80 severe crash vulnerabilities across 20 widely used systems. Ideas from his work have been adopted by a financial database startup.
- Company
- University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
- Title
- Assistant Professor
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Reynold Xin
Co–founder and Chief Architect
Reynold Xin is a cofounder and Chief Architect at Databricks, where he leads the development of core data systems including Apache Spark, Delta Lake, Photon, and Databricks SQL. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in large scale data systems.
- Company
- Databricks
- Title
- Co–founder and Chief Architect
-
Sai Venkatesh Ramesh
Software Engineer at Motorq
Sai Venkatesh is a Senior Engineer at Motorq, a leading connected-car data and analytics platform, where he works at the intersection of data infrastructure, streaming platforms, and lakehouse architectures that support AI-driven analytics.
With over seven years of experience, Sai currently leads the next-generation initiatives at Motorq, enabling the generation of actionable events and insights that empower real-time decision-making for major fleet companies across the U.S.- Company
- Motorq
- Title
- Software Development Engineer
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Samip Singhal
Engineering Manager - Online Recommendation System
Samip Singhal heads Online Recommendation System at Intuit Credit Karma. His team owns the retrieval and ranking systems behind the app’s personalized offers, combining real-time features, rigorous experimentation, and safety controls to improve relevance and outcomes. With 15+ years building and leading recommendation engineering across marketing, retail, and fintech, Samip previously served as a Center-of-Excellence Staff Data Architect advising 30 Fortune 100 companies.
His current focus is on Online Recommendation architectures that learn within a session.- Company
- Credit Karma
- Title
- Engineering Manager - Online Recommendations
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Saravanan Rajendran
Technical Lead Engineer @ Motorq
I am a Team Lead at Motorq, where I design and build scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in the connected-vehicle data space. With over six years of experience across companies like Myntra, and Motorq, I focus on improving system reliability, observability, and developer productivity while driving faster, high-quality releases.
- Company
- Motorq
- Title
- Technical Lead Engineer
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Shiyan Xu
Onehouse, Founding team member
Shiyan Xu works as a data architect for open source projects at Onehouse. While serving as a PMC member of Apache Hudi, he currently leads the development of Hudi-rs, the native Rust implementation of Hudi, and the writing of the book "Apache Hudi: The Definitive Guide" by O'Reilly. He also provides consultations to community users and helps run Hudi pipelines at production scale.
- Company
- Onehouse
- Title
- Founding team member
-
Sijie Guo
Co-Founder and CEO
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. -
Suhas Satish
Confluent, Senior Engineering Manager
Suhas Satish is a Senior Engineering Manager at Confluent leading Flink SQL, Flink runtime and streaming AI initiatives with agents. Before Confluent, he's worked at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning since 2013. Notable past roles include Senior Manager/tech lead building recommendation systems at Salesforce, tech lead at Castlight Health on search & relevance and open source contributor to several Hadoop projects such as Hive-on-spark, Apache Pig and Hue at MapR Technologies.
- Company
- Confluent
- Title
- Senior Engineering Manager
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Tom Scott
CEO at Streambased
Long time enthusiast of Kafka and all things data integration, Tom has more than 10yrs experience (5yrs+ Kafka) in innovative and efficient ways to store, query and move data. Tom is pioneering the Streaming Datalake at Streambased. An exciting new approach to raw and historical data management in your event streaming infrastructure.
- Company
- Streambased
- Title
- CEO
-
Vinay Rayini
Software Engineer at Netflix
Vinay is a Software Engineer on the Data Movement Engines team at Netflix, where he has spent the last two years developing and scaling the Kafka as a Service platform. This platform is crucial for collecting and transporting over 23 trillion events and 50 petabytes of data daily. Previously, he worked at Microsoft and Google on distributed systems and real-time data processing initiatives.
- Company
- Netflix
- Title
- Software Engineer
-
Vineet Khadloya
Engineer @ Salesforce inc.
Engineer on the Tracer and Moncloud API Platforms Team
- Company
- Salesforce
- Title
- SMTS
-
Wahab Syed
Senior Solutions Architect at AWS
Wahab Syed is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS in the Startup segment. Wahab helps early and late stage startups in their technical and growth journey. His areas of expertise are in cloud architecture, DevOps and optimization. Outside of work, he likes to socialize, present and talk at local bay area events in California.
- Company
- AWS
- Title
- Senior Solutions Architect
-
Weimo Liu
PuppyGraph CEO
Dr. Weimo Liu serves as the CEO of PuppyGraph. He was a former software engineer within Google's F1 team and a research scientist at TigerGraph. In these capacities, he specialized in advancing query languages and engines. Dr. Liu earned his PhD degree from GWU, and his BS degree from Fudan University. Notably, he actively participates as a program committee member and reviewer for esteemed conferences like SIGSPATIAL, TKDE, and KDD. His contributions extend to publications in VLDB and ICDE. He also served on the Expert Group for GQL at the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).
- Company
- PuppyGraph
- Title
- CEO
-
Yao Li
Uber, Sr. Software Engineer
Yao Li is a Sr. Software Engineer on Uber's Flink team and an Apache Heron (Incubating) committer. With a PhD and postdoctoral research background in Electronic Engineering, Yao brings deep expertise in real-time streaming systems and large-scale data infrastructure.
- Company
- Uber Technologies Inc
- Title
- Sr. Software Engineer
-
Yusheng Chen
Uber, Staff Engineer
Yusheng Chen is Staff Engineer of streaming data analytics platform. His team provides services to develop reliable, scalable, and high-performing stream processing applications. He is the tech lead to bring safe deployment to Flink as a service platform in Uber.- Company
- Uber
- Title
- Staff Engineer
-
Zhenqiu Huang
Software Engineer
Zhenqiu Huang has been in Apache Flink Community for a long time. He built Streaming Platform at Uber Technology and Apple Inc. He recently worked with Apache Hudi community on building Streaming Ingestion to Cloud-lake at Uber.
- Company
- Uber Technologies Inc
- Title
- Software Engineer
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