Jerry Peng is currently a Principal Software Engineer at Splunk working on streaming/messaging projects. Jerry is a committer and PMC member of Apache Pulsar, Apache Storm, and Apache Heron projects. Before Splunk, he worked at Streamlio (acquired by Splunk), Citadel, and Yahoo on distributed systems and stream processing. Jerry has been working in the area of distributed systems and stream processing since his days in grad school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Rajan Dhabalia is a Principal Software Engineer at Verizon Media working on messaging and distributed key-value storage technologies. His interests lie in building reliable, scalable distributed data processing systems. He is a PMC member of Apache Pulsar, a committer of Apache BookKeeper, a lead developer of Pulsar in Verizon Media, and spent several years developing Pulsar in Yahoo before making it open source.

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 Merli is the PMC Chair of Apache Pulsar and CTO at StreamNative. He is co-creator of Pulsar while at Yahoo!, co-founder of Streamlio, Committer and PMC of Apache Pulsar and Apache BookKeeper. He works for The Apache Software Foundation for 4+ years, and has rich experience in distributed pub-sub messaging platforms.

Addison Higham has been focusing on micro-services, distributed systems, big data, and cloud architecture with extensive experience in various big data Apache projects, such as Pulsar, Flink, and Spark.

Till Rohrmann is a PMC member of Apache Flink and software engineer at Ververica. His main work focuses on enhancing Flink’s scalability as a distributed system. Till studied computer science at TU Berlin, TU Munich and École Polytechnique where he specialized in machine learning and massively parallel dataflow systems.

Ricardo is Principal Developer Advocate 🥑 at Elastic, where he does community advocacy for North America. With +20 years of experience, he might have learned a thing or two about Distributed Systems, Observability, Streaming Systems, and Databases. Before Elastic, he worked for other vendors such as Confluent, Oracle, Red Hat, and different consulting firms. These days Ricardo spends most of his time making developers fall in love with technology. While not working, he loves barbecuing in his backyard with his family and friends, where he gets the chance to talk about anything that is not IT-related. He lives in North Carolina, USA, with his wife and son. Follow Ricardo on Twitter: @riferrei