Program committee

Ben Gamble serves as Field CTO at Ververica. In his role, he focuses on developing messaging and materials to engage with key stakeholders, including clients, prospects, and industry analysts.
With a background primarily in engineering leadership and entrepreneurship, Ben has extensive experience building and managing engineering teams across various sectors, including logistics, gaming, and mobile applications. His expertise lies in developing solutions centered around real-world interactions, particularly in areas such as GPS-based technologies, augmented reality, and multi-user collaboration.
Outside of his professional life, Ben is an avid technology enthusiast. He enjoys playing and creating video games and trading cards. Ben balances his career with family life, being a father to two young children and a caretaker to three pet ducks.

Erik is a director and co-founder of Hivemind Technologies AG, a technology consultancy focussed on cloud and data engineering with functional programming and Infrastructure as Code. Prior to Hivemind, Erik founded several companies and worked in finance, advertising and industrial sectors building scalable distributed software platforms.“

Steffen is the CEO and co-founder of Airy, a Data Streaming for AI company building the agentic AI layer for stream processing powered by Apache Flink.

Sujay is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, where he is part of the Data Platform team. He tackles a range of challenges in data movement, processing and real-time analytics space and has contributed to key platforms like Data Mesh and Keystone. Prior to joining Netflix, Sujay was part of the Data Infrastructure team at Meta.

Lorenzo Affetti works as a Software Engineer at Ververica enhancing its product offering to enable users to run and manage their data streaming jobs seamlessly. After obtaining his PhD in Computer Science in the field of stream processing at Politecnico di Milano, Lorenzo worked at InfluxData developing languages and runtimes for processing time series data, and at Huawei Technologies as a research engineer in object storage cloud services. His main interest is distributed systems for data processing, storage, and retrieval.

Dr. Yuan Mei is a PMC member of the Apache Flink project focusing on the State and Runtime stack. She is the Director of Engineering at Alibaba and leads the Flink storage engine team. She is also the architect of Flink Engine. Before joining Alibaba, Dr. Mei was a research scientist at Facebook, leading and developing various streaming systems. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL.

Ted Dunning is an HPE Fellow working in HPE Labs to help teams across HPE develop pragmatic techniques for security, machine learning, data access and building very large-scale systems. He has a long history building startups in machine learning and large data systems including MapR, Veoh Networks, ID Analytics and MusicMatch and has a strong background in open-source software, including serving on the board of directors at the Apache Software Foundation.

Antón is a Principal Software Engineer at New Relic, specializing in Data in Motion and high-throughput streaming systems. As an enthusiastic Java developer, he frequently works with Apache Kafka and Flink. Beyond his core engineering work, Antón is a Rust aficionado and keen on reducing his carbon footprint.