Learn, innovate, and network with brightest minds in Agentic AI and data streaming at Redpanda's Streamfest 2025

Alex Gallego created Redpanda in 2019 with the vision of making real-time data accessible to all developers. Prior to Redpanda, Alex was the co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream-processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. Alex began his career as a hacker and builder in his hometown of Manizales, Colombia and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU.

Tyler Akidau is the Chief Technology Officer for Redpanda Data, and one of the industry’s foremost experts on stream processing. He has spent the better part of the last two decades working on large-scale streaming systems at Google, Snowflake, and now Redpanda. He is the author of the ever popular Streaming 101 and Streaming 102 articles, and the Streaming Systems book published by O’Reilly.

Connie Wang is a software engineer at the newly formed Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies joint venture. She joined Rivian in October 2020 as the fifth engineer on the data platform team and then transitioned to Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies in November 2024 to continue developing technology that will set the standards for software-defined vehicles around the world. Connie is currently working on scaling and optimizing a multi-tenant platform for ingesting, storing, and querying vehicle telemetry data, as well as ensuring privacy-centric enforcement of access controls on vehicle data. Outside of work, she’s an avid tennis fan and traveler and recently completed her bucket list goal to travel to all 7 continents.

Kir Titievsky,  Product Manager, Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache KafkaOver the last decade, Kir has worked with hundreds of users looking for the right kind of storage. He worked on growing Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Apache Kafka services and partnerships. Kir is fascinated by repetition patterns of problems and solutions recurring in local and distributed storage systems, across streaming and batch systems.  But what does he know about AI, you say?  He knows that if your GPUs are waiting for storage, you are in trouble; he knows that if there is nothing there to wait for, it’s even worse; and he knows if you get storage right, you can enjoy great models others build.  Kir’s favorite place is Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York where he walks his dog now that his kids don’t want to go there.

Arya Ketan is a Senior Principal Engineer at ShareChat, where he leads infrastructure projects, saving the company costs while improving performance and compliance.

He has more than a decade of experience – both as a hands-on software developer and as a technical leader. Arya has led pivotal projects in distributed systems, including developing a Service Orchestration Cloud platform and optimizing data infrastructures at companies like Flipkart and WhiteHat Jr., and is an expert in cloud-native technologies.

Stanislav is an Apache Kafka committer and a self-taught software engineer who has worked for high-growth startups for all of his career. After years in engineering, he now consults companies at the intersection of technology and marketing — helping them tell technical stories that resonate to their technical target audience. He’s best known as the writer behind 2 Minute Streaming, where he publishes sharp, accessible insights on Apache Kafka and the broader data-engineering ecosystem.

Steven Wu is a software engineer at Snowflake - pushing the boundary of data and AI cloud. Previously he worked at Apple and Netflix and helped build modern data platforms focusing on streaming and lakehouse. He is a member of Apache Iceberg PMC. He is passionate about building scalable distributed systems and empowering people with data.

Will Martin is the EMEA Evangelist at Dremio with experience as a data engineer, academic, solutions architect, and software developer. He has spent 15+ years collaborating with companies and organisations across EMEA and APAC, including roles at CERN, BMT, Deloitte, and Tamr. Beginning with a background of statistical analysis in particle physics, his professional journey has spanned multiple industries, including banking, shipping logistics, entertainment, healthcare, defence, and customer 360.

Melvyn Peignon is a Principal Product Manager at ClickHouse, where he collaborates with the engineering team on the core ClickHouse database. With years of experience in analytics databases and distributed systems, Melvyn contributes to the roadmap for how ClickHouse can be effectively used alongside technologies like Redpanda to support users in their real-time and near real-time analytics use cases.

Jason Reid is a Director of Product Management at Databricks and co-founder of Tabular. He's currently working on enhancing data compatibility and interoperability between lakehouse formats.

Shil Sircar is Senior Vice President of Product Engineering and Data Science at Arctic Wolf, where he leads the development of internet-scale data and machine learning systems that power advanced threat detection across cloud and endpoint environments. His teams deliver scalable infrastructure, robust data services, and MLOps to support applied ML in cybersecurity.

Shil serves on the Technology and AI Advisory Board at Glilot Capital Partners and the Steering Committee of the Canada AI Alliance, contributing to AI innovation and governance. A frequent speaker at RSA, Sector, and other industry forums, he holds numerous patents and publications in machine learning, cryptography, mobile messaging, and satellite imaging.

He earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and communications engineering from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Peter is a co-founder of DBOS, helping you build reliable software effortlessly. He co-founded DBOS based on his PhD work at Stanford, where he was advised by Peter Bailis and Matei Zaharia and worked closely with Michael Stonebraker. He is interested in databases and distributed systems.