Program committee

Fabian is a committer and PMC member of the Apache Flink® project and has been contributing to Flink since its earliest days. Fabian is a co-founder of Ververica, a Berlin-based startup devoted to fostering Flink, where he works as a software engineer and contributes to Apache Flink®. He holds a PhD in computer science from TU Berlin and is currently writing a book about “Stream Processing with Apache Flink®”.

Tyler Akidau is a software engineer at Google, where he is the technical lead for the Data Processing Languages & Systems group, responsible for Google's Apache Beam efforts, Google Cloud Dataflow, and internal data processing tools like Google Flume, MapReduce, and MillWheel. His also a founding member of the Apache Beam PMC, and the author of the Streaming Systems book from O'Reilly.

Jamie Grier is the tech lead of the Streaming Platform Team at Lyft and has been involved with Apache Flink for a few years now.  Jamie was previously the Director of Applications Engineering at data Artisans and has been working on stream processing for the last decade at companies such as Twitter, Gnip and Boulder Imaging. This has spanned everything from ultra-high-performance video stream processing to social media analytics.

Stefan is an Apache Flink committer and works as a software engineer at Ververica. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University where he worked as a researcher in the field of information systems. His research focus was on indexing, big data, and main memory databases.

Eric was an early employee at Cloudera before he founded Rocana which was acquired by Splunk. Today, he is a Distinguished Engineer at Splunk working on platform services including stream processing. He's the author of "Hadoop Operations" and is involved in a number of open source projects.

Sonali Sharma is a senior data engineer at Netflix in the Personalization team, which delivers user recommendations. She has extensive experience working on data at large scale. This data is used for training and scoring of the machine learning models that power the Netflix homepage. She has also spent time processing data in near-real-time using Apache Flink. A UC Berkeley graduate, Sonali has worked on a variety of problems involving big data. Before Netflix, She was at Yahoo, working in mail monetization team with a focus to build great data driven products to do large scale data extractions, and audience insights for targeting.

Dean is Lightbend's VP for Fast Data Engineering. His team is developing the Lightbend Fast Data Platform (FDP) which includes Flink among other streaming systems. Dean wrote a few books on Scala functional programming and Hive.