The Apache Flink® Conference
Program committee
Seattle 2023
About the Program Committee
Our program committee take responsibility for planning and shaping the program of Flink Forward. They make sure to rate talks in different dimensions to create a balanced program including deeply technical talks and high-level use cases. Diversity is also a crucial aspect for the program committee - they strive to improve and support the presence of underrepresented groups at the conference.
Program committee
- Jing GeCTO & Apache Flink PMCVerverica
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.
- Robert MetzgerCo-founder, Engineering LeadVerverica
Robert Metzger is a PMC member of the Apache Flink project and a co-founder and an engineering lead at Ververica (formerly data Artisans). He is the author of many Flink components including the Kafka and YARN connectors. Robert studied Computer Science at TU Berlin and worked at IBM Germany and at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as the Hadoop Summit, ApacheCon and meetups around the world.
- Ramayan TiwariEngineering LeadNetflix
Ramayan Tiwari is an engineering lead in the Data and Insights group at Netflix, overseeing the ingestion and processing of user behavior and app analytics events. He has been a key contributor to the systems and datasets that power personalization and machine learning at Netflix. Ramayan's interest and expertise lie in building and operating large-scale distributed systems, distributed data stores, and messaging systems. Before Netflix, Ramayan worked at Cruise Automation to develop storage solutions for events generated from self-driving cars, Salesforce in their distributed job scheduler, and Amazon's metadata service.
- Matteo MerliCTOStreamNative
Matteo is the CTO at StreamNative, where he brings rich experience in distributed pub-sub messaging platforms. Matteo was one of the co-creators of Apache Pulsar during his time at Yahoo!. Matteo then co-founded Streamlio with Sijie Guo, and later served as the Senior Principal Software Engineer at Splunk post-acquisition. Matteo is the PMC Chair of Apache Pulsar, where he helps to guide the community and ensure the success of the Pulsar project. He is also a PMC member for Apache BookKeeper. Matteo lives in Menlo Park, California.
- Lakshmi RaoSoftware EngineerLyft
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.
- Jark WuStaff Software EngineerAlibaba Cloud
Jark Wu is a committer and PMC member of Apache Flink and the original creator of Flink SQL, Flink CDC, and Fluss. He currently leading the Flink SQL and Fluss team at Alibaba Cloud. His work has long centered on distributed systems, particularly in the areas of big data computing and storage.
- Chen QinSr ManagerPinterest
Chen serves as Sr Manager overseeing Pinterest data processing.
- Becket QinPrincipal Staff Software EngineerLinkedIn
Becket is a PMC member of Apache Flink and Apache Kafka. He is interested in stream and batch unification of computing engines and storage systems. Becket currently works at LinkedIn streams infra team on Apache Flink. Prior to that, he was at Alibaba leading the development of Flink SQL, Flink Connectors, Flink CEP, PyFlnk, Flink ML among other Flink ecosystem projects.
- Francesco TisiotStaff Developer AdvocateAiven
Francesco comes from Verona, Italy and works as a Developer Advocate at Aiven. With his many years of experience as a data engineer, he has stories to tell and advice for data-wranglers everywhere. Francesco loves sharing knowledge with others as a speaker and writer, and is on a mission to defend the world from bad Italian food!