Barcelona 2025
Program committee

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.

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.

Sujay Jain is a senior software engineer and technology leader who has built transformative large-scale data platforms and distributed systems at Microsoft, Meta, and Netflix. At Netflix, he led the development of the Streaming SQL and Data Mesh platforms, transforming the company's data architecture and powering critical systems including real-time recommendations, game analytics, and advertising infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of global subscribers. His deep expertise in stream processing, Flink SQL, and data infrastructure has enabled mission-critical applications that blend technical innovation with practical business value. Sujay is also a respected mentor and thought leader contributing to the broader tech community through conference presentations, technical publications, and mentorship initiatives, helping shape industry best practices while developing the next generation of technical talent.

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.