Conference faces

Aleksey is working on Java performance for 10+ years. Today he is employed by Red Hat, where he does OpenJDK development and performance work. Aleksey develops and maintains a number of OpenJDK subprojects, including JMH, JOL, and JCStress. He is also an active participant in expert groups and communities dealing with performance and concurrency. Prior joining Red Hat, Aleksey was working on Apache Harmony at Intel, then moved to Sun Microsystems, which was later consumed by Oracle.

Associate Professor of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest is in database management systems, specifically main memory systems, self-driving/autonomous architectures, transaction processing systems, and large-scale data analytics. At CMU, Andy is a member of the Database Group and the Parallel Data Laboratory. He's the co-founder and CEO of OtterTune.

A former RabbitMQ core-dev, before moving to Europe he used to work in Shanghai where he helped building one of Germany biggest dating websites.

He co-authored the book "RabbitMQ in Action" for Manning Publishing.

Apart from code related activities he likes traveling with his wife, listening/playing music, and reading books.

Lena Hall is a Director of Engineering at Microsoft. She is leading a team and technical strategy for product improvement efforts across Big Data services at Microsoft, as a part of Cloud Advocacy in Azure Engineering. Lena has more than 10 years of experience in software engineering with a focus on distributed cloud programming, real-time system design, highly scalable and performant systems, big data analysis, data science, functional programming, and machine learning. Previously, she was a senior software engineer at Microsoft Research. She’s co-organizes a conference called ML4ALL, and is often an invited member of program committees for conferences like Kafka Summit, Lambda World, and others. Lena holds a Master’s degree in computer science.

Andras is the founder and CTO of dianemo DB. Previously he worked as a freelance consultant in both London and Budapest. He specialises in enterprise software, with a focus on distributed systems.

Nathan VanBenschoten joined Cockroach Labs five years ago as a Software Engineer focusing on the performance of CockroachDB's transaction, replication, and persistence layers. Before Cockroach Labs, he was a member of the Google-Wide Profiling team, working on Google's continuous profiling infrastructure.

Software engineer believing in craftsmanship and the power of fresh espresso. At work, he enjoys facing the challenges of distributed systems, especially in JVM-oriented environments. Technical blogger (mikemybytes.com) & consultant, working daily as a Software Architect.

Irfan Sharif is a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs, working on CockroachDB's distributed transactional key-value layer. He was a founding member of their engineering office in Canada. Before Cockroach Labs, he worked on search relevance at Amazon and machine learning infrastructure at LinkedIn.

Andrey Gura is one of the engineers who have been working on the Apache Ignite project since the early days and has hands-on experience both with product development and helping customers to adopt Apache Ignite and GridGain according to their needs. Being a member of the architecture group at GridGain, Andrey works in close contact with all development teams and drives technical decisions related to foundational aspects of the Apache Ignite project, such as protocols, storage, performance, and usability.

Jack Vanlightly is a distributed systems engineer and tester that has focused on messaging systems and distributed system testing. He has worked as a member of the RabbitMQ core team at VMware and is now a principal software engineer at Splunk working on the Apache Pulsar/BookKeeper messaging stack.

Andrey Fomichev is the Head of the Data Storage and Processing Department at Yandex. He works at Yandex starting from 2008, was engaged in the development of Web Search Crawler, Yandex Infrastructure, and Yandex Cloud. Topics of interest include databases and distributed systems. Andrey holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Moscow State University.

Software developer in the Kotlin Libraries Team. Also, part of the Concurrent Computing Lab at JetBrains working on verification of concurrent data structures and algorithms.

Markus Kuppe is an engineer at Microsoft Research. His focus is making spec-driven development (with TLA+) more popular among fellow engineers.

Adam Morrison is an assistant professor at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel. His research is on the performance and security of shared-memory multiprocessors, from microarchitecture through operating systems to concurrent algorithms. His work has been awarded the inaugural Intel Hardware Security Academic Award (2021), best paper awards at MICRO'19, ASPLOS'20, and ASPLOS'21, as well as IEEE Micro Top Picks (2019) and Top Picks Honorable Mention (2018).

Lalith Suresh is a researcher at VMware Research in Palo Alto. He is currently leading efforts to simplify the design, development, and testing of large-scale cluster managers. He has also worked on areas like failure detection, programmable networking, big data, and remote memory. He received his doctorate from TU-Berlin in 2016.

Valentin Kulichenko is one of the original committers and PMC members of the Apache Ignite project — a distributed in-memory computing platform that enables scalability and high performance for thousands of applications all over the world. Valentin contributes to various aspects of the development, including code, documentation, and architectural discussions. During the last 10+ years at GridGain, Valentin has been acting as one of the lead architects of the GridGain platform, which is based on Apache Ignite. He also helped multiple customers of GridGain to adapt the platform to their needs. Currently, as a Director of Product Management, Valentin leads the effort to transition to a new generation of GridGain products, with the main focus on improved usability, faster adoption, and modernization.

Founder and CEO at VectorizedIO. Alex Gallego is the founder and CEO of Vectorized, where he & the team hack on Redpanda, a modern streaming platform for mission-critical workloads. Before Vectorized, he was a principal engineer at Akamai, as well as co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream processing engine built in C++ and acquired by Akamai in 2016.

Naama Ben-David is a postdoctoral researcher at VMware. She completed her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, where her dissertation received an honorable mention for the CMU SCS Dissertation Award. Her primary research interests are in the intersection of theory and practice in distributed computing. More specifically, Naama strives to theoretically explain phenomena seen in modern machines and to use obtained insights to design and analyze practical algorithms for concurrent settings. Naama is the recipient of an NSERC postgraduate scholarship and a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship.

Andrey is working as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Aurora. In the past he has worked on: testing a distributed NewSQL database at Yandex, cloud antivirus detection at Kaspersky Lab, an online multiplayer game at Mail.ru, and a foreign exchange pricing service at Deutsche Bank. Andrey is interested in bulding large scale distributed databases and backend systems.

Ivan has over 8 years of experience working with Java and started as a C++ developer. For the last 6 years he has been working with in the field of financial markets, previously worked for Otkritie Broker where he was involved in the development of a risk assessment system. Later he led the infrastructure team at one of the largest hedge funds in the US. Now Ivan is trying himself in a new area of Real-time bidding.

Tech Lead for Network & Compute Services in Yandex.Cloud. Previously, Ivan was leading one of the development teams of the platform for distributed storage and processing of YT data. Ivan is a co-founder of Distributed Systems learning program at the Computer Science Faculty in Higher School of Economics.

The software development manager in Amazon. 13 years in IT. Java development and architecture trainer in Luxoft Training Center.

Nail wrote decision-making systems for the US insurance market and developed applications for training astronauts. Today he's developing a new payment system with a talented team. He also helps to organize .NET meetups in Kazan.

Nikita is a researcher in the Kotlin team and has been getting a PhD in the field of concurrency. His primary research interests are, but not limited to, concurrent data structures and algorithms, their verification, and practically applicable code analysis. He is also a frequent speaker at JPoint and Joker conferences.

Noah is a software engineer at Vectorized working on Redpanda, a high-performance drop-in replacement for Kafka. Previously, he worked on the Rook project at Red Hat focused on Ceph orchestration in Kubernetes. Noah lives in San Francisco, received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Cruz in 2018 studying distributed storage systems, and before that was hacking on real-time Linux at the University of Kansas.

Denis Rystsov is a staff engineer at Vectorized working on Redpanda, a Kafka-compatible distributed event streaming platform. His area of experience lays in distributed transactions, consensus algorithms, and testing consistency models. He likes to track academic computer science research and use it as leverage in the industry.

Denis volunteers as a member of the Hydra program committee and as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Systems Research (JSys).

He received his MSc in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from SPbSU. Before joining Vectorized he worked at Yandex, Amazon, and Microsoft. Apart from coding/researching he likes surfing and exploring the waters of the PNW on a SUP.

Software Engineer at dxFeed / Devexperts with decades of experience in developing high-performance financial software. Researcher and practitioner with a focus on concurrent systems development and verification. As a head of dxLab participated in the research and development of several tools helping to find various kinds of issues in concurrent programs on JVM, such as non-linearizable behavior, data-races, etc.

Software Engineer at Workato.

Ivan's areas of interest are distributed systems and databases. He went through different projects and now helps Workato to make their platform even better.

Nikolay is a tech lead developing transaction processing for international payment system. Interested in distributed systems and domain-driven design.

Vitaliy Aksenov currently is a researcher at ITMO University. His research focuses on practice and theory of concurrent data structures.

Before ITMO University, Vitaliy was a post-doc in IST Austria under the guidance of professor Dan Alistarh and received his PhD from Paris 7 Diderot and ITMO University under the guidance of professor Petr Kuznetsov.

Producer @ JUG Ru Group, organizes the largest conferences for developers in Russia. In the last 6 years Alexey's team arranged more than 50 conferences. Alexey has a very different background: from Software Engineer @ Oracle (JCK, Java Platform Group) to DevRel @ Odnoklassiniki.

Software Engineer at Workato.

Ivan's areas of interest are distributed systems and databases. He went through different projects and now helps Workato to make their platform even better.