Berlin Buzzwords 2026

Alessandro Benedetti is an Apache Lucene/Solr committer and Solr chair of the PMC, Director at Sease Ltd.
He believes in Open Source as a way to build a bridge between Academia and Industry and facilitate the progress of applied research.
Alessandro is a passionate R&D software engineer, continuously applying the latest trends in Information Retrieval and AI to solve search problems.

He’s been working on Learning To Rank for years and more recently he’s been exploring Generative AI techs like Large Language Models and Retrieval Augmented Generation.
When he isn't on clients' projects, he contributes to the open-source community and presents at meet-ups and conferences such as ECIR, Search Solutions, Community Over Code, Haystack and Berlin Buzzwords.

I'm a passionate AI Engineer from Italy. I spend most of my time working with PHP and Python to build AI-powered experiences. Diving into the realms of documents is my second life.

Amine Gani is a Software Engineer and Search Consultant at Adelean, where he specializes in building high-performance search solutions with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. With expertise in data indexing, search relevancy, and analytics, he helps clients optimize their e-commerce search engines and also A2, Adelean’s search solution for e-commerce. He works at the intersection of software engineering and information retrieval, ensuring integrations tailored to business needs.

Andrey Abramov is the Founder and CTO of SereneDB, where he is building a real-time analytical search and OLAP database. With over 15 years of experience in C++, Andrey specializes in production-grade search engines and database kernel internals.
Prior to SereneDB, Andrey was the mastermind behind ArangoSearch, a search engine natively integrated into ArangoDB's distributed multi-model database core.
Earlier in his career, Andrey held senior engineering roles at EMC and Quest Software, where he managed teams and led the development of enterprise-scale systems.

André has worked with software for ages (Robotron KC 87), and he found his passion in building scalable search apps. He studied computer science at TU Berlin and has more than 15+ years of experience in classifieds and a deep search footprint across SQL, Solr, Elasticsearch, and Vespa.

Ankit Jain is a Software Engineer on the Amazon OpenSearch Service team, leading performance and scalability initiatives for search infrastructure. He is an active maintainer and committer for the Apache Lucene and OpenSearch projects, with hands-on experience operating large-scale OpenSearch deployments and solving complex production performance challenges.

I’m a Research & Development Software Engineer and Search Consultant at Sease, where I help companies design and improve intelligent search solutions. I work with the most well-known search engines such as Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Vespa. I operate closely with clients to tackle complex search challenges, from relevance tuning and learning to rank to neural search and NLP integration. I enjoy diving into real-world problems, experimenting with new approaches, and finding the right balance between research and production-ready solutions. I also share insights with the search community through talks and collaborations.

Apurva Misra is a machine learning engineer, speaker, and founder of Sentick, where she helps growing teams unlock practical, ROI-driven AI solutions across automations, predictive analytics, and copilots.
As a consultant, she builds end-to-end AI systems from discovery to production. In one client engagement, she delivered an AI customer support system that reduced support emails by more than 30%.

Her academic work includes a University of Waterloo Master’s focused on driver cognitive distraction detection, publications in IEEE Access with 100+ citations so far.

She especially enjoys the education side of AI getting founders and teams up to speed on what’s genuinely useful and how to apply it through over 40 publicly listed talks, workshops, webinars, panels, and podcast appearances.

Atita Arora is an open-source contributor and PMC at Apache OpenNLP, with a long-standing career dedicated to advancing search, information retrieval systems, and AI. She focuses on advancing search technologies that connect research to meaningful, real-world applications. A regular speaker at international conferences, she also co-leads Women in Search, advocating for diversity and inclusion across the tech community. Atita is an independent AI and Search consultant, advancing practical innovation in modern search systems, driven by the belief that innovation delivers its greatest value when shared and applied.

Bartosz Mikulski is a Senior Data Engineer at Start.io, where he works on ML systems handling 50 billion requests per month. He co-created the MLOps platform at Qwak (acquired for $230M) and contributed to the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know" (O'Reilly). He trains engineering teams on Python, MLOps, and AI. Over 500 technical articles published (mikulskibartosz.name). Previous speaker at Berlin Buzzwords, Infoshare, DataNatives, and DevOpsDays.

Busayo Ojo is a passionate advocate for open-source and open source programs. Her work focuses on contributor onboarding, building inclusive communities, and writing documentation that actually helps people get started.

Machine Learning Engineer at Progress

Carlos Rolo, Principal Open Source Engineer, is a family man who loves doing random activities with his wife and kids, playing water polo, and exploring AI innovations alongside tinkering with home tech setups. With expertise in Rust, Python, and a strong foundation in Go, Carlos is a celebrated 2x Cassandra MVP, Opensearch Ambassador and has released a groundbreaking time series compressor (instaclustr/atsc) with 7 patents pending. Actively
engaged in the Cassandra and Opensearch community, he enjoys sharing technical insights and fostering collaboration.

I’m a computer scientist working in ML and NLP, with a soft spot for fairness, linguistics, and trying to make the world a bit better, or at least not worse.
I’m also passionate about making the tech world more inclusive and thoughtful, one system (or conference talk) at a time.

Celeste Horgan is a Sr. OSS Developer Advocate and OSPO Lead at Snowflake. Previous roles include work at Aiven, The Linux Foundation, Stripe and commercetools. She has worked in open source since 2020, is a former contributor to the Kubernetes project, and currently immersed in the Postgres open source ecosystem. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and she regularly speaks internationally at technical conferences.

I'm The Search Juggler, an expert search consultant who has been helping companies large and small build scalable, performant and accurate search applications for over 25 years. My clients have included governments, global e-commerce giants, law firms and startups. I co-host the London Search & AI Meetup and ran the Haystack conference series for 5 years. I'm an OpenSearch Ambassador, and a Vespa.ai Partner - but I work with many different search engines.

Danica began her career as a software engineer in financial services and pivoted to developer relations, where she focussed primarily on open source technologies under the Apache Software Foundation umbrella such as Apache Kafka and Apache Flink. She now leads the open source advocacy efforts at Snowflake, supporting Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris (incubating). She can be found on X (Bluesky and Mastodon), talking about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.

Daniel began his career as a doctoral researcher in cloud computing, focusing on distributed databases in the cloud. After completing his PhD, he co-founded the Benchmarking-as-a-Service platform benchANT, where he is responsible for planning and executing cloud and database benchmarking projects.

David Kjerrumgaard is a Developer Advocate at StreamNative and a committer on the Apache Pulsar project. He is recognized for his expertise in real-time data streaming, messaging systems, and big data technologies. As author of Pulsar in Action and co-author of Practical Hive, he has established himself as a leading voice in the streaming data ecosystem.

An accomplished international speaker, David presents at conferences worldwide on big data, streaming technologies, and agentic AI. His technical contributions extend beyond the stage—he actively contributes to Apache NiFi and maintains his committer status on Apache Pulsar, directly advancing these open-source platforms.

Nearly two decades working in Search. David started at Fast Search shortly before it was acquired by Microsoft then continued down the search rabbit hole working on NLP-powered information solutions, machine learning applications, and eventually AI strategy consulting. Now at Veeva Systems, he's building intelligent search and AI-powered SaaS applications for the life sciences.

Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.

An astrophysicist and computer scientist based in the Berlin metropolitan area, earned a PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2015. Currently a researcher at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY), contributing to the development of the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO).

Dmitry is currently in charge of managed OpenSearch product business at Aiven, where he leads both product and engineering supporting clients around the world. He previously served as Senior Product Manager at TomTom, Principal AI Scientist at Silo AI / AMD, and Head of Search at AlphaSense.

He is the founder and host of the Vector Podcast.

Contributor to open source (Quepid, Luke), and member of the OpenSearch Search Technical Advisory Group (TAG). Applied and extended Apache Solr and Apache Lucene for 10 years and worked with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch for over 6 years. Dmitry believes in the power of live discussion with every practitioner that drives a wider understanding of where we are moving as the search community.

Researcher at the University of British Columbia. Previously at OpenAI, Stripe, and the University of Cambridge, working on distributed systems infrastructure and security. More at https://emilie.ma.

Developer Advocate at Qdrant with 8 years of IT experience across software engineering, machine learning, and developer advocacy.
Holds a Technical University of Munich master's degree in Data Analytics and Engineering.
Passionate about NLP and Information Retrieval.
Believes in conference-, complaints- and memes-driven development:)

Filip Makraduli is a London‑based machine learning engineer and developer relations professional with a background in data science and AI, particularly in recommendation systems and language technologies. He has a masters in Biomedical Data Science from Imperial College London and is an experienced speaker.

I bring DevEx into products, tech into marketing, and storytelling into demos at Databricks. I presented at the top tier 1 conferences on every continent except Antarctica and built and delivered hands-on workshops for some ten thousand customers per year.

I leverage AI tools to create compelling technical content, from voice-activated data queries using Databricks Genie to AI-generated demo content with synthetic speech, enhancing developer-focused marketing campaigns.

I'm a published author with a Ph.D. in Computer Science (summa cum laude from TU Munich) with over 25 years of expertise in data & AI, cloud computing, and scientific research. Cloud Technologist of the Year (Oracle) and Developer Champion.

At AWS, I kickstarted developer relations in Central EMEA and tripled the size of the team. Presented at Devoxx, JavaOne, re:Invent, KubeCon, Oracle World and Data + AI Summit.

I believe it’s the combination of compelling storytelling and deep technical understanding that allows me to simplify complex concepts and create tech demos that truly resonate with audiences.

Geetha is a Solutions Architect specializing in big data management , storage , Kubernetes and Durable execution, with expertise in cloud-native and on-premises solutions. She ensures customer success and maturity by delivering effective, simplified solutions.

Ex-head of product at Packhelp, where she led internal tools and applications. Built products at organizations of different sizes, giving her insights into why traditional software development practices should no longer be maintained. Co-founder at Intentee.

Gülçin started working with PostgreSQL at a startup in 2012 and was immediately struck by how powerful it is. Since then, she has been an active member of the PostgreSQL community, organizing conferences, giving talks and contributing in various ways. In recognition of her commitment, she was elected to the PostgreSQL Europe Board in 2017 and recognized as a PostgreSQL contributor in 2024.

Driven by her interest in PostgreSQL automation and cloud technologies, Gülçin joined 2ndQuadrant where she led cloud development efforts until the company was acquired by EDB in 2020. She is also an active member of Postgres Women, advocating for greater diversity and inclusion in technical communities.

Gülçin currently works at Xata, where she continues to focus on PostgreSQL engineering. Beyond her professional work, she is a co-founder of Kadin Yazilimci (Women Developers of Turkey) and has led its core team for more than 11 years. In 2023, she launched the Diva: Dive into AI conference as a Kadin Yazilimci initiative and has been part of the organizing team since.

She lives in Prague where she is the co-founder and organizer of the monthly Prague PostgreSQL Meetup for over eight years. Gülçin remains deeply involved in the PostgreSQL community and is committed to contributing to the long-term health and sustainability of the project.

Haralampos (Harry) Gavriilidis is a data systems researcher and incoming postdoctoral researcher at ICSI / UC Berkeley, focusing on cross-platform and federated query processing, optimizer design, and execution across heterogeneous engines. He recently earned his PhD from TU Berlin, where he built systems for decentralized federated query processing and adaptive cross-system data transfer. His work has appeared at leading data management conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE.

Beyond papers and prototypes, Harry enjoys explaining complex data systems to real audiences. He has spoken at practitioner conferences such as PGConf and also won a science slam competition for making database research stage-friendly. He is also an active community volunteer, supporting events like Berlin Buzzwords, FOSS Backstage, and Flink Forward. Before academia, he worked as a full stack web developer.

Hartmut is a software engineer and tech lead with a strong passion for architecture, data streaming, and distributed systems. He has designed and delivered solutions for mission-critical platforms, working with clients including HSBC, NEX Group plc, Raiffeisen Switzerland, GoodLabs Inc., Deutsche Bahn, and eu-LISA. Hartmut is driven by a desire to see the bigger picture and excels at aligning engineering teams through clear, compelling architectural designs.

Hugo Jiménez Muñoz is a Machine Learning Engineer at RavenPack , where he builds high-performance NLP models for financial analytics. Specializing in RAG optimization and Transformer fine-tuning, he bridges the gap between vector search and structured query requirements. His background includes Knowledge Graph engineering and building scalable AI architectures on AWS.

Data Scientist with a strong focus on integrating Machine Learning and Deep Learning into information retrieval systems. She has also worked on Search Quality Evaluation across multiple projects. She loves exploring new technologies, applying state-of-the-art solutions in Search and giving back to the community through technical talks and open-source contributions, particularly to Apache Solr.

Jan Lehnardt is a developer and businessperson from Berlin. He’s the PMC Chair for Apache CouchDB and PouchDB as well as a CEO at Neighbourhoodie Software. He’s been building scalable database solutions with CouchDB since 2007.

Jason is a software developer born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA in the United States, where he's a proud husband and father of two. He's worked with Apache Solr for 10+ years, with search experience going back even further.

Jo Kristian Bergum is the CEO of HORNET.dev and a 25-year veteran of the search industry, formerly serving as the Chief Scientist at Vespa.ai and a Distinguished Engineer at Yahoo.

João Gilberto Magalhães (JG) is a seasoned software developer and DevOps/Platform Engineer with a strong background in building and operating distributed systems. He has hands-on experience designing applications and the infrastructure that runs them, working across backend development, cloud platforms, and automation. Throughout his career, JG has helped organizations evolve from monolithic, manually operated systems into scalable, resilient, and observable platforms using AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code. His developer background allows him to approach DevOps pragmatically, focusing on developer experience, system reliability, and real production constraints. An active open-source contributor and maintainer, JG shares tools and patterns that emphasize simplicity, maintainability, and operational clarity. He brings a practical, engineering-first perspective, connecting deep technical work with measurable business outcomes.

Hey,

I'm Johannes, a Data Scientist who loves to tell educative stories about Machine Learning methods and AI. Preferably I'm doing this in Open Source communities.

I've been working with Computer Vision for more than 10 years, ranging from designing my own Haar-Cascade face detection, over research on autonomous cars and helping people configure their photobooks automatically, all the way to undestanding the needs of smalle and medium sized enterprises, to create tailored solutions for them.

Julian von Hoerschelmann-Schliwinski is an astrophysicist and PhD candidate at DESY and based in Berlin. Working on the ULTRASAT space mission, he specializes in the intersection of space instrumentation and data analysis pipelines. He combines deep technical expertise with a focus on applying scientific rigor and AI-supported operations to real-world industrial challenges.

Julien runs DigitalPebble, a consultancy specialised in Green Software, GreenOps and Digital Sustainability. With 20+ years experience as a software developer, he has been involved in many open source projects, mainly at the Apache Software Foundation. Combining a personal passion for sustainability and environmental issues with his technical skills, Julien helps organisations reach their decarbonisation targets.
Julien is a certified FinOps practitioner from the FinOps foundation and is a member of Boavizta, the Green Software Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation.
He lives in Bristol and outside of work, enjoys music, furniture making, cycling and rewilding. Julien was at the very first BerlinBuzzwords and has given several talks there over the years.

Kris Freedain (he/him) is an OpenSearch Ambassador, Senior Community Manager for the OpenSearch Project & OpenSearch Software Foundation technical steering committee, and serves on the OpenSearch Software Foundation Marketing Committee. He has decades of experience in tech, but finds connecting people to be the most fulfilling part of being a community professional. Kris is also a Fediverse admin for the Fosstodon instance and serves as a Fosstodon Foundation Board Member. His hobbies include gardening, garage gym powerlifting, and meditation.

Kris Jenkins is a Lead Developer Advocate for Snowflake, the host of the Developer Voices podcast, and a lifelong programmer. Over the course of his career he's been the CTO of a gold-trading company, a functional programming contractor specialising in Haskell, and a regular hackathon organiser.

He loves good software architecture, innovative new programming languages, and most of all, building stuff.

Since 2012 I’ve been working in the field of IT in different positions. Now I am the product lead Automation + AI for the transformation department of OGD ict-diensten. I’m responsible for the propositions regarding Power Platform, AI and Automation. Besides that I also consult a multitude of customers about these topics and their cloud platforms. Due to this broad range of topics I work with on a daily basis, I’ve developed a passion for connecting them all together. When I’m not working on improving specific systems I’m looking into how the systems can work together to create even more value. I also write on my blog https://www.autosysops.com about the solutions I find.

Lester Solbakken is a Founding Engineer at HORNET.dev, where he builds production-grade retrieval infrastructure for AI agents. Previously pursued a PhD within Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with research centered on neural networks, exploratory data analysis and self-organizing systems. He speaks about building reliable, high-performance AI systems that bridge research and real-world deployment.

Marcel Dokters is a data scientist at NOZ Digital, where he is building AI tools that support the daily workflows of journalists at the local newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.

Matthias Niehoff works as Head of Data and Data Architect for codecentric AG and supports customers in the design and implementation of data architectures. His focus is on the necessary infrastructure and organization to help data and ML projects succeed.

She is the founder and CEO of Xata, a Postgres platform for modern development, backed by Index Ventures and the founders of Elastic, Confluent, Vercel, and Netlify. Before Xata, she founded Packetbeat, an open source network monitoring solution that was acquired by Elastic in 2015. At Elastic, Packetbeat became Beats, the observability data shipper that surpassed 300 million downloads in its first two years and is used by organizations of all sizes worldwide.
Monica is also the founder of Tupu.io, a non-profit providing free mentorship to underrepresented people breaking into tech.

Naci Simsek is a Senior Customer Success Technical Manager at Ververica with over 17 years of experience in IT and Telecom. He began his career as a Customer Support Engineer at Nortel Networks, advancing through roles as Software Engineer, Engineering Team Lead, Project Manager, and Solutions Architect at Huawei. Over nearly a decade, he specialized in customer-facing big data solutions as a Platform Engineer, BI Engineer, and Data Engineer. In his current position, he supports customers in leveraging Apache Flink for real-time data streaming across on-premises and cloud environments.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Ege University, an MBA from Bahcesehir University, and the PMP® certification.

Neelesh Salian builds data platforms. He has led lakehouse and distributed systems work at Datavant, Stitch Fix, dbt Labs, Salesforce, and Cloudera, with a focus on Spark, streaming, and Apache Iceberg in production. He created Floe to solve a problem he kept encountering: orchestrating Iceberg table maintenance at scale.

Nick has been involved in Open Source for longer than he cares to remember. He leads the Engineering team at Saible, which is trying to ensure that people working in construction projects actually get paid. That involved some hard technical challenges, lots of integrations, and rather a lot of cat-herding!

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.

A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.

As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

Paul has first been involved as in the organization of Berlin Buzzwords as an intern in 2015 and has been a part of the team ever since. He's now the managing director of Plain Schwarz and together with his team also organizes events like FOSS Backstage or Scala Days.
Paul describes himself as a Free and Open Source Software enthusiast and in his spare time you will find him listening to cricket on the radio or deeply immersed in a good book – sometimes even both.

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for over ten years, Philipp is now the head of Developer Advocacy at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in the heart of San Francisco, he is close to the cutting edge of technology without getting lost in the latest hype.

Italian, adopted by France not long ago, I am a constant learner, dedicated to computer science and discovery, whether uncovering solutions or gaining insights.

Priscilla Lola Adenuga works with language data at the intersection of linguistics and NLP. Her background is in syntactic analysis and linguistic fieldwork, with hands-on experience annotating low-resource language data. She is interested in data quality, annotation practices, and how insights from linguistics can inform more robust and realistic NLP systems.

Radu has been in the search space for many years, mainly on Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, and, more recently, Vespa.ai. Helps users with both the relevance and the operations side of retrieval. Enjoys education in all its forms (training, blog posts, books, conferences...) and got the chance to be involved in all of them.

Radu provides Consulting Services as Solutions Architect at Adelean. He handles projects around Elasticsearch and Adelean’s A2 search technology. He oversees the integration and evolution of search engines within large e-commerce platforms, marketplaces or organizations' data lakes. Prior to joining Adelean, Radu acquired a solid experience in Web archiving, operating large scale crawling systems in the context of several European research projects. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a MSc in Distributed Systems.

Rafael Aguiar has battle scars from building streaming engines, distributed systems, and real-time analytics in production.
When not at work, he’s probably hiking somewhere.

Author, software engineer, trainer and consultant focused on information retrieval. In his work helping companies throughout the whole software lifecycle - from requirements gathering and architecture, through implementation and deployment ending with scaling and tuning. In his free time a novice carpenter and ultra runner with varying degree of success.

Rahul is an Apache Solr committer and a Principal Software engineer on the search infrastructure team at Commvault. He has spent over a decade working in the search field, and is passionate about the domain.

He loves to get into the guts of how things work and is an active member of the Apache Solr and Lucene community.

Ralph is a former AI/NLP researcher turned software engineer, solution architect and technologist, now acting as the Lead Enterprise Kafka Engineer at Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund in Zuerich, Switzerland. He has received his PhD in computer science focusing on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence in 2006 (Saarbruecken University and University of Edinburgh) and has spent 15 years at SAP, Bosch and Forecasty.AI/BASF SE before joining Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund in 2023.

Ravindra Harige is the founder of Searchplex, a firm focused on designing scalable AI-native search and discovery systems across multiple industry verticals.

Experienced backend developer with 8+ years specializing in distributed systems and cloud technologies. Currently working as SDE 2 at AWS OpenSearch, contributing to OpenSearch's core functionalities.

Roman is a Principal Software Engineer at Streambased. His experience includes building business critical event streaming applications and distributed systems in the financial and technology sectors.

Roudy is a software engineer at Adelean, where he specializes in designing and building advanced search solutions across diverse platforms. His work covers modern information retrieval, including classical search techniques, AI-driven retrieval, relevance reranking, and vector-based search for semantic understanding. With a strong focus on leveraging AI to enhance search quality, Roudy develops search engines that deliver more accurate, efficient, and personalized results.

Ruth Suehle is Director of Open Source at SAS, where she is building a nearly 50-year-old analytics, data management, and AI software company’s first open source program office. She is also president of the Apache Software Foundation and a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors. Ruth has helped build open source communities for nearly two decades, much of which she spent in the OSPO at Red Hat. Co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O’Reilly, December 2013) and former editor of Red Hat Magazine and opensource.com, she is a frequent writer, currently as core contributor at GeekMom.com(previously of WIRED), where she covers the adventures of motherhood and fandom.

Sandesh is a Software Developer working on the OpenSearch Project, with a focus on enhancing search performance and cluster resilience. He is also a maintainer of OpenSearch (core) and hosts the Search Backlog & Triage Community Meeting every Wednesday, where he engages with the community to review open issues, prioritize feature requests, and drive improvements to OpenSearch's Search components.

Sandra Bullón is a Senior Product Manager experienced in building data, analytics, and search products.

Major advocate for rigorous evaluation and human-in-the-loop approaches to building reliable AI.

You cannot improve what you don't understand.

Shailesh Kumar Singh is a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, working on OpenSearch. His work focuses on building high-performance analytics systems at scale, with contributions to aggregation optimization through Star Tree indexing and efficient data processing and compaction using Parquet. He is particularly interested in designing scalable systems that balance performance, storage efficiency, and real-world usability.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, with a minor in Finance, and is interested in scalable systems and fintech.

Skip Everling is Head of Developer Relations at Hornet.dev, with over two decades of experience across AI infrastructure, developer tools, and technical go-to-market. He helps developers use Hornet, the retrieval engine built for agents with a verifiable API surface that agents can configure, deploy, query, and optimize.

Stanislav Don is a Data Scientist at eBay, working on production machine learning systems and model reliability. His work focuses on data quality, bias detection, and monitoring ML models in real-world environments. He regularly shares practical lessons from deploying ML at scale through conference talks and applied research.

🧑‍🚀 AI Engineer/explorer. Passionate about Language Models, open source, and knowledge sharing.

👨‍💻 I work on the open-source Haystack LLM orchestration framework, contributing code, tutorials and demos.

🧭 Fascinated by all things LLMs. From inference and orchestration (Agents, RAG) to post-training techniques. I frequently experiment with training small Language Models and Reinforcement Learning. I like sharing what I learn.

Steffen is a Field CTO at Confluent, where he helps global enterprises harness the full potential of real-time data and AI by bringing Apache Flink and Apache Kafka to the core of their architectures. He partners with customers to modernize their data infrastructure, integrating AI models, metadata, data governance and data lineage to unlock new capabilities for agentic AI powered by continuous intelligence on streaming data.

Sr Software Engineer interested in distributed systems and vector databases

Tilda Udufo is a software engineer, developer advocate, and open source community organizer. She works with global mentorship and contribution programs, supporting hundreds of contributors and maintainers across multiple open source projects. Through her work, she focuses on making technical systems more accessible, sustainable, and human-centered.

She has reviewed and mentored thousands of contributions, helped design onboarding and feedback processes, and regularly teaches coding concepts to beginners. Tilda is especially interested in how understanding “how things work” behind the scenes leads to better learning, better debugging, and healthier communities.

When she’s not working on open source infrastructure, she enjoys exploring the intersection of code, design, and education.

Long time enthusiast of Kafka and all things data integration, Tom has more than 15yrs experience in innovative and efficient ways to store, query and move data. Tom is currently CEO at Streambased a company focused on unifying operational and analytical data estates into a single, consistent and efficient data layer.

Uwe is committer and PMC member of Apache Lucene and Apache Solr. His main focus is on development of Lucene Core. He implemented fast numerical search and is maintaining the new attribute-based text analysis API. He studied Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and works as managing director for SD DataSolutions GmbH in Bremen, Germany, a company that provides consulting and support for Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch, and Apache Solr. He also works for “PANGAEA – Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data” where he implemented the portal’s geo-spatial retrieval functions with Lucene Java. Uwe had talks about Lucene at various international conferences like the previous Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon EU/US, Lucene Revolution, Lucene Eurocon, and various local meetups.

Valeriia is a backend engineer at Kleinanzeigen, with a focus on recommendation systems and search. She is originally from Russia and is currently based in Berlin. She holds a degree in computer science, where she discovered her passion for building backend services.

Over the course of her career, she has worked across fintech, banking, and healthcare, primarily using Java and the Spring ecosystem. Her recent work reflects a strong interest in search technologies, particularly relevance, vector-based retrieval, and improving overall search quality.

Bio: Varant spent the last 13 years building data infrastructure for AI and ML at Airbnb and Palantir. During this time, he became one of the original authors of Chronon, the recently open sourced feature and embedding platform. Currently, he is Co-Founder of Zipline AI, which is building an enterprise platform around the project.

Vincent is the VP Commercial at Cognee. He worked for 4+ years in venture capital, investing in 20+ AI, open-source, and infrastructure companies, at early-stage all over Europe. As an investor, he led the pre-seed round of Cognee and joined the company full-time as the commercial and growth lead by the end of 2025. He loves to talk about anything related to knowledge graphs, memory, context, world-models, or open-source.

Vincent has an academic background in economics and data sciences from LSE in London.

William Benton is a software engineer at NVIDIA, where he builds tools to help make machine learning systems easier to develop, more understandable, and more reliable. In previous roles, Will's responsibilities included establishing and improving the expected value of accelerated data science frameworks for everyday practitioners, leading teams of data scientists and engineers, contributing to many open-source communities, and developing novel static analyses for real-world software.

Xiao Meng is a software engineer specializing in data infrastructure, stream processing, and SRE. He is the Streaming Team Lead at Goldsky, where he leads development of a declarative, serverless real-time data platform for blockchain data. Previously, he was an Expert Data Engineer at Activision/Demonware, building a real-time game telemetry platform for titles including Call of Duty.

Yingjun Wu is the founder of RisingWave Labs (https://www.risingwave.com/), a database company developing RisingWave, an event streaming platform for agents, apps, and analytics. Before running the company, Yingjun was a software engineer at the Redshift team, Amazon Web Services, and a researcher at the Database group, IBM Almaden Research Center. Yingjun received his PhD degree from National University of Singapore, and was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been working in the field of stream processing and database systems for over a decade.

Zoi Kaoudi is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) and the VP/PMC Chair of Apache Wayang. Her current research focus is on (i) leveraging machine learning techniques for data-intensive systems, (ii) improving the performance and ease of use of machine learning systems, and (iii) advance knowledge graph embeddings with ontologies and logical reasoning. Before joining ITU, she has held positions in various places around the world. She has worked as a Senior Researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, as a Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), as a visiting researcher at IMIS-Athena Research Center, and as a postdoctoral researcher at Inria Saclay. She received her Ph.D. from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2011. She has co-authored articles in both database and ML communities and served as a member of the Program Committee for several international database conferences. She has received the best demonstration award at ICDE 2022 for her work on training data generation for learning-based query optimization.

I am a Spaniard customer-oriented engineer living in Switzerland. Working on StreamNative since 2022 as Solutions Engineer.

I have 20 years of experience working at different levels, from C++ developer under Linux to security consultant.

In a previous life, I did a Master's in Neuroscience.