The Current 2025 Program Committee

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sujay Jain is an accomplished engineer and technology leader with deep expertise in building transformative data platforms and distributed systems at Microsoft, Meta, and Netflix. At Netflix, he led the innovative Streaming SQL platform and drove the strategic transformation of the Data Mesh platform, reshaping real-time data architecture for hundreds of millions of subscribers. As an international speaker and respected mentor, he contributes to the tech community through conference presentations, technical publications, and mentorship initiatives, establishing him as a recognized voice in data platform architecture and streaming technologies.

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