Tom is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat based in the UK. He is a maintainer of Strimzi, a CNCF sandbox project for running Kafka on Kubernetes using operators. Alongside his Strimzi work Tom has also contributed to the Apache Kafka project. He has spoken at numerous international conferences about Kafka and Strimzi. In his previous role Tom was a developer on a compiler for the Ceylon programming language.

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.

Chris is an Apache Kafka committer who specializes in Kafka Connect. He began working in the Kafka ecosystem at WePay in 2016, where he developed a sink connector for Google BigQuery. He now helps maintain Apache Kafka as part of his responsibilities in the open source program office at Aiven.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams – she never looked back. Danica now works as a Developer Advocate with Confluent where she helps others get the most out of their event-driven pipelines.

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.

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.