Berlin 2024
Program committee

Jing Ge, Head of Engineering at Ververica and Apache Flink® PMC, brings over 20 years of hands-on experience in software systems and cutting-edge streaming technologies. With a master's degree from TU Hamburg, his career includes notable roles at Ant Group and eBay leading full-stack data initiatives. At Ververica, he oversees engineering teams driving enterprise streaming data platform projects. Jing Ge's exceptional analytical skills and leadership make him a driving force in the field of big data technologies.

Seasoned Tech Lead with a background in various industries like retail, telecom, tech, and banking, in various roles like engineering, consultancy, and management. Has worked on Apache Flink within ING since its inception in 2016, helping it grow towards the de facto standard for streaming at ING worldwide. Erik was a speaker at Flink Forward 2023.

Xintong Song is a Staff Software Engineer and leads a team that works in Flink’s distributed execution framework at Alibaba Cloud. He is also an Apache Flink PMC member and committer, the starter and promoter of Flink 2.0. He holds a Ph.D. from Peking University. Xintong is an established member of the Apache Flink community, and a veteran speaker on stage.

Gunnar Morling is a software engineer and open-source enthusiast by heart, currently working at Decodable on real-time ETL based on Apache Flink. In his prior role as a software engineer at Red Hat, he 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 QCon, Java One, and Devoxx. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Na Yang is the Engineering Manager of the Flink Platform team at Uber. Her team provides a full-managed platform to deploy and operate Flink jobs used by application developers and data scientists to support Uber's real-time stream data processing. Throughout her career at MapR, PayPal and Uber, Na has led teams for building large-scale platform-as-a-service for application developers. The platforms she has operated and built includes Hive, Kafka, Atlas Message Queue and Flink platforms.

Vasia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Boston University, where she co-leads the Complex Analytics and Scalable Processing (CASP) Systems lab. She enjoys doing research on modern storage, and dev eloping practical solutions for private collaborative analytics with Multi-Party Computation. Recently, together with her team, she has been focusing on designing self-managed systems for data stream processing, scaling graph Machine Learning training on modern storage, and developing practical solutions for private collaborative analytics with Multi-Party Computation.

Damian Stevens has been working as a software engineer for the last 20 years, but more recently in executive management. He is currently leading (and co-founded) a small consultancy that is specializing in Data Engineering, with a heavy slant on data streaming. He is 45 years old, married and a father of 3 boys. He is originally from Australia, but has been living in the Netherlands for the last 20 years.

Giannis is a Staff Streaming Product Architect - experienced in event streaming and stream processing systems. He helps companies modernize their data infrastructure by leveraging streaming technologies and enable them to build fast and scalable data pipelines, streaming data flows and deliver real-time analytics. Over the years he has worked with an extensive set of technologies like Apache Kafka, Pulsar, Spark delivering data infrastructures and these days he focuses on stream processing with Apache Flink and streaming lakehouses.

Filip Yonov is the Head of Streaming Data at Aiven, where he oversees the Streaming Platform. With a rich background in product leadership, Filip specializes in cloud infrastructure, data streaming, and managed services. Throughout his career, Filip has contributed to the success of leading enterprise cloud companies, including ING, Booking.com, EY, IBM, and Docker, leveraging his expertise to enhance their product offerings and market position. Filip received his Masters of Science in Management from Rotterdam School of Management.