2025 Program Committee

Adi Polak

Adi Polak

Director of Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering
Confluent
Anna McDonald

Anna McDonald

Technical Voice of the Customer
Confluent
Antón Rodriguez

Antón Rodriguez

Principal Software Engineer
New Relic
Chip Huyen

Chip Huyen

AI x Storytelling
David Anderson

David Anderson

Software Practice Lead at Confluent, Apache Flink Committer
Confluent
Diptiman Raichaudhuri

Diptiman Raichaudhuri

Staff Developer Advocate
Confluent
Gunnar Morling

Gunnar Morling

Senior Principal Software Engineer
Decodable
Israel Ekpo

Israel Ekpo

Principal Cloud Solutions Architect
Microsoft
Jiangjie (Becket) Qin

Jiangjie (Becket) Qin

Software Engineer and Senior Manager, Real-time Computing
LinkedIn
Neil Buesing

Neil Buesing

Co-Founder, CTO
Kinetic Edge
Nikki Thean

Nikki Thean

Engineering Manager
Etsy
Olena Kutsenko

Olena Kutsenko

Senior Developer Advocate
Aiven
Omnia Ibrahim

Omnia Ibrahim

Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer
Apple
Paris Carbone

Paris Carbone

Associate Professor of Data Systems
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Sandon Jacobs

Sandon Jacobs

Senior Developer Advocate
Confluent
Sophie Blee-Goldman

Sophie Blee-Goldman

Co-Founder
Responsive
Vasiliki (Vasia) Kalavri

Vasiliki (Vasia) Kalavri

Assistant Professor
Boston University
Organized by Confluent
Adi Polak

Adi Polak

Confluent

Linkedin
Twitter
Afzal Mazhar

Afzal Mazhar

Confluent

Linkedin
Twitter
Anna McDonald

Anna McDonald

Confluent

Anna McDonald is a Principal Customer Solutions Technical Architect with Confluent. Prior to joining Confluent she was a Principal Software Developer with SAS Institute. She specializes in integration architecture and event streaming. Her most recent work includes creation of the Derivative Events design pattern. A speaker at Kafka Summit and Jfokus her love of all things technical is matched only by her love of math puns.

Linkedin
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Antón Rodriguez

Antón Rodriguez

New Relic

Antón is a Principal Software Engineer focused on Data in motion. He has experience working with different message brokers, event streaming platforms and stream processing frameworks. During his career, he specialised in building internal SaaS in big corporations to make complex technologies easily used and adopted by teams so they can build solutions to real business use cases. He’s also a JUG organiser, blogger, podcaster and speaker.

Linkedin
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Avinash Upadhyaya

Avinash Upadhyaya

Platformatory

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Chip Huyen

Chip Huyen

Linkedin
Twitter
Dave Klein

Dave Klein

Tabular

Dave is a Senior Developer Advocate with Quix, where he helps Python developers take advantage of streaming data. Before joining Quix, he was a Senior Developer Advocate with Confluent, an application developer, project manager (recovered), trainer, conference speaker, co-author of Kafka in Action, and a homeschooling father of fourteen children. If he had any spare time, he’d enjoy hiking, reading, and playing with the grandchildren.

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David Anderson

David Anderson

Confluent

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Twitter
Dipankar Mazumdar

Dipankar Mazumdar

Onehouse

Linkedin
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Diptiman Raichaudhuri

Diptiman Raichaudhuri

Confluent

Linkedin
Twitter
Gunnar Morling

Gunnar Morling

Decodable

Linkedin
Twitter
Israel Ekpo

Israel Ekpo

Microsoft

Israel Ekpo is an experienced solutions architect and strong proponent of Open-Source software particularly those related to search, data storage, visualization, analysis, and event stream processing. Over the years, Israel has had the opportunity to evolve while wearing many hats including but not limited to: technical trainer, software engineer, technical analyst, consultant, and solutions architect. He is currently serving as a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect with Microsoft Global Partner Solutions and is very passionate about learning new technologies. Israel loves to leverage his life experiences and in-depth knowledge of a broad range of technologies to mentor others and provide pragmatic solutions to real world problems.

Linkedin
Twitter
Jiangjie (Becket) Qin

Jiangjie (Becket) Qin

LinkedIn

Linkedin
Twitter
Neil Buesing

Neil Buesing

Kinetic Edge

Neil Buesing is a software architect and engineer; with 20 years of experience building JVM based enterprise applications. He is involved with designing, building, and promoting of real-time data technologies.He is an avid user of Kafka, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. He currently works with companies to stream their data into Apache Druid leveraging Apache Kafka.

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Nikki Thean

Nikki Thean

Etsy

Nikki manages the Upstream Data engineering team at Etsy. Until 2021, she was a staff engineer working on Etsy's streaming data platform, including its primary Kafka cluster and clients. She enjoys doodling, giving technical talks, and illustrating slides with drawings of cats.

Linkedin
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Olena Kutsenko

Olena Kutsenko

Aiven

Linkedin
Twitter
Omnia Ibrahim

Omnia Ibrahim

Apple

Linkedin
Twitter
Paris Carbone

Paris Carbone

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Linkedin
Twitter
Pavan Keshavamurthy

Pavan Keshavamurthy

Platformatory

Linkedin
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Robert Metzger

Robert Metzger

Decodable

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Robin Moffatt

Robin Moffatt

Confluent

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Sandon Jacobs

Sandon Jacobs

Confluent

Linkedin
Twitter
Satish Duggana

Satish Duggana

Uber

Linkedin
Twitter
Sophie Blee-Goldman

Sophie Blee-Goldman

Responsive

Sophie Blee-Goldman is an Apache Kafka PMC member.  She has focused on the availability and scaling behavior of Kafka Streams & ksqlDB, as well as improvements to the consumer group rebalancing protocol.

Linkedin
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Sujatha Sivaramakrishnan

Sujatha Sivaramakrishnan

Confluent

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Tom Bentley

Tom Bentley

Red Hat

Tom is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat based in New Zealand. Tom is a committer for Apache Kafka and sits on the PMC. Currently working on Kroxylicious, an open source Kafka protocol proxy, he is also a maintainer of Strimzi, the CNCF incubator project for running Kafka on Kubernetes. He has spoken at numerous international conferences about Kafka and Strimzi.

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Vasiliki (Vasia) Kalavri

Vasiliki (Vasia) Kalavri

Boston University

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Viktor Gamov

Viktor Gamov

Confluent

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Twitter