The Current 2025 Program Committee

Adi is an experienced Software Engineer and people manager. For most of her professional life, she has worked with data and machine learning for operations and analytics. As a data practitioner, she developed algorithms to solve real-world problems using machine learning techniques and leveraging expertise in Apache Spark, Kafka, HDFS, and distributed large-scale systems.

‍

Adi has taught Spark to thousands of students and is the author of the successful book — Scaling Machine Learning with Spark. In early 2024, she embarked on a new adventure with data streaming, specifically Flink, and she can't get enough of it.

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.

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.

Ben Gamble is Field CTO at Ververica. With a background in engineering leadership and entrepreneurship, he’s led teams across logistics, gaming, and mobile apps, focusing on solutions involving GPS, AR, and multi-user collaboration. Off-duty, he enjoys creating video games and trading cards, and cares for his two children and three pet ducks.

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.

Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent. Designed and implemented ‘Modern Data Platform’ for large scale enterprise use cases. Works at the intersection of Data(Kafka, Flink, Spark, Kinesis, Redshift, Iceberg, Glue, Hive, Neo4j, Neptune) and AI(torch,sagemaker,vertex ai,kubeflow, LLMs) at cloud scale (AWS and Google Cloud).

Gunnar Morling is a software engineer and open-source enthusiast by heart, currently working as a Technologist at Confluent. Previously, he helped to build a realtime stream processing platform based on Apache Flink and led the Debezium project, a distributed platform for change data capture. He is a Java Champion and has founded multiple open source projects such as JfrUnit, kcctl, and MapStruct. Gunnar is an avid blogger (morling.dev) and has spoken at various conferences like Current, Kafka Summit, QCon, and Java One. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.

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.

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.

‍

A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.

‍

As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

Omnia is a software engineer at Apple, focusing on building Kafka ecosystems and streaming platforms at scale. She has been working with Kafka for years across multiple companies and is also an Apache Kafka committer.

Sandon Jacobs is a Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent, based in Raleigh, NC. Sandon has two decades of experience designing and building applications, primarily on the JVM. His data streaming journey began while building data pipelines for real-time bidding on mobile advertising exchanges—and Apache Kafka was the platform to meet that need. Later work in television media and the energy sector included Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and provisioning Kafka infrastructure with various infrastructure as code frameworks.

‍

Outside of work, Sandon is actively involved in his Indigenous tribal community. He serves on the NC American Indian Heritage Commission, and also as a powwow singer and emcee at many celebrations around North America. Follow Sandon on Twitter @SandonJacobs or Instagram @_sandonjacobs, where he posts about his powwow travels, family, golf, and more.

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.

‍