Global 2020

Niels Basjes (1971) has been working for bol.com since May 2008. Before that, he was working as a Webanalytics architect for Moniforce, and as an IT architect/researcher at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. Since the second half of the 1990s he has been working on processing problems that require scalability. He has applied these concepts in the past 20 years in aircraft/runway planning, IT operations and in the field of web analytics to build reports for some of the biggest websites in the Netherlands. Also at bol.com the primary focus of Niels Basjes are scalability problems and he is responsible for a shift in thinking about data and the business value it contains. Niels designed and implemented many of the personalization algorithms that are in production today at bol.com. Niels studied Computer Science at the TU Delft, and has Business administration degree at Nyenrode University. Niels is an active opensource developer who is one of the Apache Avro PMC members and has authored ( https://github.com/nielsbasjes/ ) and contributed various improvements and bugfixes to projects like Hadoop, HBase, Pig and Flink.

Sruthi Sree Kumar is a dual degree master student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and TU Berlin. She is also a research intern at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) where her primary focus of work is in distributed data processing systems. She wrote her master thesis on External Streaming State Abstractions and Benchmarking. Her research work is focused on performance improvement of Flink state backend.

As a Lead consultant at ThoughtWorks with over 14 years of industry experience, Arti is responsible for architecting and building enterprise data solutions, providing advisory to clients in multiple strategic initiatives. In the past she has led the efforts of building multiple data-driven initiatives like scaling a high-volume data processing pipeline for radio telescope, creating recommendation engine for retail domain and re-architecting the enterprise application echo system for financial customers.

Lakshmi is a software engineer on the streaming platform team at Lyft. The team builds and supports the core infrastructure that enables several product teams at Lyft to easily and reliably spin up Flink jobs to perform aggregations on real-time data. Most recently, she has been spending time re-architecting the platform to a Kubernetes based deployment. Prior to Lyft, Lakshmi worked in fin-tech land, building a search and information retrieval platform for Goldman Sachs.

Solving data processing at scale at Spotify. I'm an active open source contributor for projects spanning the areas of functional programming, type systems, tooling, and infrastructure.

Chinmay Soman has been working in the distributed systems domain for the past 10+ years. He started out in IBM where he worked on distributed filesystems (NFS) and replication technologies. He then joined the Data Infrastructure team in LinkedIn and worked on Voldemort – an open source distributed key-value store, as well as Apache Samza. He’s currently a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Uber where he leads the Streaming Platform team. This team is responsible for building a pub-sub messaging infrastructure and real time analytics platform.

Menglei is a Senior Software Engineer at Houzz. He is responsible for a wide range of data projects including Flink infrastructure and its applications, logging data pipeline & observability, mobile data engineering. Prior to this, Menglei worked at Blackrock focusing on the data pipeline and storage.

Julien has been working with Scala and contributing on various open-source projects for the past 10 years. Since 2018, he is working for Spotify as a Data Engineer in the Data & Insight tribe, building libraries and tooling used in most of Spotify's data pipelines.