We Are All Working
Together

Shaik currently leads all the tech initiatives at Dataplatform @Ola. He is architecting and building a platform at Petabyte scale on cloud.

Benjamin spent the first part of his career as a security analyst in US Intelligence. However, he tired of playing spy and wearing fake mustaches, so he went backpacking abroad for a year to find himself. Benjamin eventually found himself hiding under a tuk tuk in Thailand and has spent the last three years working as a software engineer on Twitter's analytics infrastructure.

Anton spent the better part of four years developing cloud infrastructure for eBay / Paypal and Seagate. Afterwards, he wired together Continuous Integration and Deployment for internal and external cloud infrastructure at Tonomi. Before coming to Twitter, Anton helped build the next-gen VisaNet, powering all transactions at Visa on open source technologies and commodity hardware with obscenely high SLA and consistency requirements. For the last year or so, he has worked as a software engineer on Twitter's analytics infrastructure.

Sumit Gupta is Vice President in the IBM Cognitive Systems, where he leads the product and business strategy for AI, Machine learning, and HPC. He joined IBM two years ago from NVIDIA, where he was the GM of the AI and Data Center business.

Nikhil Joshi leads Product Management for Data Platforms at Uber. He has spent his entire career wrangling massive data sets at companies like Yahoo!, Greenplum, EMC, and Uber. He is passionate about building platforms that focus on solving gnarly business problems by hiding (not ignoring) the grizzly details of the underlying infrastructure. His engineering background and product acumen give him a unique perspective on tackling this domain.

Zack Shapiro is currently leading the data engineering team at Nextdoor, the trusted communications platform for your local community. Nextdoor currently hosts over 85% of the the neighborhoods in the US, along with thousands of public agencies, connecting people with the neighbors and services that make up their local community.

James Rowland-Jones (JRJ) is a Principal Program Manager for Microsoft. He is passionate about delivering highly scalable solutions that are creative, simple and elegant in their design. James specializes in scale out analytical solutions such as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Analytics Platform System and the Big Data ecosystem.

JRJ is a keen advocate for the SQL community. He has previously served on the Board of Directors for PASS and helped organize SQLBits in the UK; raising millions of dollars by building an ecosystem of partners around events. James was awarded Microsoft’s MVP accreditation from 2008 - 2015 for his services to the community.

David Phillips is a software engineer at Facebook on the Presto team. He started the Presto project with three other engineers in 2012 and helped it grow into a large project used widely both within Facebook and across the industry. He has worked for many internet companies including Adknowledge, Ning, and Proofpoint, and was involved in data warehousing at all of them. He has extensive experience building and running internet-scale distributed systems.

David Oh is a Data Pipeline Engineer at Autodesk where his responsibilities include building ETL pipelines to create foundational datasets, supporting enterprise data operations and building a data instrumentation quality assessment scoring model. Prior to working as a Data Engineer, David worked as a data analyst / BI analyst providing insight into customer accounts. More recently, David has been focused on enabling a data driven culture within Autodesk driven by trusted and accurate corporate metrics.

Santanu Dey is currently a director of data science and engineering at Fanatics. He focuses on product recommendations, personalization, user behavior targeting, email science and optimization, Web and customer analytics, in addition to building data platform for the company. He has wide range of skills and experiences in building distributed systems & web services, and solving complex problems with data and machine learned models. In the past he worked in various capacities in the area of software engineer and data science at eBay and as a data scientist in Facebook.

ODC was one of the principal adaptors of Qubole back in 2014, and has grown to be one of Qubole’s largest customers in big data processing. Justin works with over 100 analysts & developers within ODC using Qubole for their workloads and has helped grow Qubole into their primary processing platform over the last three years. Currently, ODC runs approximately 100 Hadoop & Spark clusters totaling nearly 3 million processing hours per month in Qubole.

Charles Pritchard has worked in data engineering for over a decade, architecting custom search and reporting solutions and working with the broad open source ecosystem that has developed around big data. He brings hands-on experience from his time supporting software and business intelligence developers at Expedia and The Walt Disney Company.

Dan Sutherland is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO in the Big Data & Analytics Global CoC organization. He also is an IBM Senior Certified IT Architect and an Open Group Distinguished IT Architect. He is an influential technologist and recognized technical leader in large, complex Analytics and Digital projects with extensive experience and significant contributions in the Communications, Insurance and Banking industries. Mr. Sutherland holds several architecture patents and exhibits an exceptional acumen to applying innovation and bridging strategic business vision. In addition, he is highly sought after by customer executives as their technical consultant and trusted advisor, and his contributions are demonstrated through superior leadership and an outstanding track record of successful engagements.

Garren is a Senior Data Engineer at BluePrint Technologies in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in and has focused his work on Apache Spark for the past 3 years. Garren created Structured Streaming and Spark ML production applications to do real-time decision making on Qubole, built a robust real-time big data science and reporting solution for iSpot.tv, and architected the core IP data assets in B2B marketing space. His interests include enabling data scientists and engineers to use big data at scale to solve vexing problems. Garren has a BBA in Management Information Systems from Washington State University.

Erik is an Advanced Analytics and AI Architect on Microsoft’s Global Black Belt team where he helps companies from all over the US and Canada build out AA and AI solutions. He has over 10 years of experience in statistics, analytics, and other data disciplines at companies such as Medtronic, Target, and Microsoft. He’s a self-proclaimed geek who once wrote a Python version his sons’ favorite board game – just because it sounded fun.

Barkha Saxena is the Vice President of Data & Analytics at Poshmark where she built the data team from the ground up and leads all data, analytics, data science and BI platform initiatives across business strategy, product, user growth, merchandising, marketplace operations and community service.

Barkha has 15+ years of experience in developing, delivering and selling data science and analytics products across multiple industries. Before joining Poshmark, she led the development of price sensitivity scores as VP Analytics Product at Nomis Solutions and data science based digital media buying products as VP of Advanced Analytics at comScore. Barkha started her career at FICO where in the course of a decade long tenure she helped found the company’s Data Science team and created predictive analytics solutions across a range of industries include finance, insurance, and retail.

Barkha holds an MBA from Wharton, an MA Statistics from UCSB and an integrated MS & BS in Statistics from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur).

Rohit Agarwal works on Kubernetes at Google. His current focus area is hardware accelerator support in Kubernetes. Prior to Google, Rohit worked on data infrastructure at Cloudflare and Qubole. He holds a B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Ropar.

Ori Elkin is the product lead for DigitalGlobe's commercial analytics efforts, managing the GBDX product suite, the company's geo-spatial big data solution.
Ori has been working on data and analytics products (which are his main passions outside dairy farming) for the past 15 years. Ori holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an MBA from UC Berkeley

John Slocum is the VP of MediaMath’s Data Management Platform. A recovering engineer and New England native, John puts to use engineering and MBA degrees from Worcester Polytech and Boston University at every opportunity. John’s broad software and product background spans CAD, IT and Ad Tech industries.

Puneet is a Software Engineer working with Data Platform and Infrastructure team at Lyft. He is passionate about building scalable services, platforms and tools. He has worked with Data and Platform teams at Linkedin, AppDynamics and Walmart in the past.

Sean is a theoretical physicist practicing as a data scientist at Expedia, Inc. His present work involves a number of fun projects like building learning-based recommendation systems to aid Expedia customers and suppliers. He has also spent a lot of effort in marketplace and auction design — building incentive structures to promote and reward supplier behavior that leads to great customer experiences. More time than he'd like to admit has also been spent t migrating on-premesis workflows to the cloud. Downes is excited about Spark, functional programming with Scala, functional analysis, graphs, algebraic topology, statistical physics and creative solutions to new or ill-defined problems. I’m from Hawaii but reside in Seattle.

Saba El-Hilo is a data engineer at Mapbox, where she builds data pipelines, infrastructure and tooling for large scale distributed data. Prior to Mapbox, Saba has worked as a data engineer at multiple startups such as Signal Sciences, Rocana and Hootsuite which have given her tremendous experience in building data infrastructure and pipelines from the ground up. She holds an M.S in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University with an emphasis on Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

Navin works as a Principal Engineer at BloomReach, presently managing and leading the Backend Infrastructure team. He is most passionate about building and designing scalable distributed systems.

Vignesh Sukumar is a Data Products focused engineering leader and has built several high performing data teams at Box, Platfora (acquired by Workday) and Optimizely. Currently, he leads the Distributed Systems team at Optimizely and holds multiple patents in the areas of Data Storage, Cloud Computing and Databases.

Waad Aljaradt is a Data Engineer at InMarket media LLC where she builds data pipelines and the infrastructure for large-scale data transformation, maintenance, and analysis. Waad completed a Master's degree in Software Engineering with an emphasis on distributed systems and data mining from San Jose State University. She is also an Insight Data Science fellowship recipient; as a fellow, she created a platform to search related Github repositories using topic modeling algorithms.

Data Scientists are expected to wear many hats in an organization. From ingesting and cleaning data, managing data storage, creating scalable machine learning models, and publishing APIs to expose and schedule services for end users, there are many tasks that often fall in the realm of data science. This talk focuses on how to create end-to-end data science products that allow data scientists to focus on business logic, all while embracing nearly infinitely horizontally scaling data platforms. To do this, we’ll explore serverless cloud technologies at multiple levels of the data science pipeline such as serverless compute, workflow, containerized workloads, distributed, on-demand machine learning, metrics tracking, and API gateway access. At the end of this talk we'll have a prototype for an end-to-end machine learning system, on a scalable cloud platform, capable of processing petabytes of data and thousands of requests without the need for any freestanding servers.

Karthik was the engineering manager and technical lead for Real Time Analytics at Twitter. He is the co-creator of Heron and has more than two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company that specializes in real time streaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL that was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, he had a brief stint with Greenplum where he worked on parallel query scheduling. Greenplum was eventually acquired by EMC for more than $300M. Prior to Greenplum, Karthik was at Juniper Networks where he designed and delivered platforms, protocols, databases and high availability solutions for network routers that are widely deployed in the Internet. Before joining Juniper at University of Wisconsin, he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engine and online analytical systems. Several of these research were spun as a company later acquired by Teradata. He is the author of several publications, patents and one of the best selling book “Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures.” He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UW Madison with a focus on big data.

Before co-founding Qubole, Ashish ran Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team; under his leadership the team built one of the largest data processing and analytics platforms in the world. This platform achieved not just the bold aim of making data accessible to analysts, engineers and data scientists, but drove the “big data” revolution. In the process of scaling Facebook’s Big Data infrastructure, he helped drive the creation of a host of tools, technologies and templates that are used industry wide today.

Innovator and strategist with internationally recognized expertise in conceiving, championing, designing, and developing cutting-edge solutions in support of cutting-edge scientific and other business initiatives. Current specialty in Big Data governance and architecture. Background in integration of data, analytics, and models, documented by an impressive publication record. Broad experience in media, biotech, clinical research, healthcare, environmental science.

Tom is a Hands-on data professional with experience building operations, BI, development, and support teams for data-intensive SaaS products. Specializing in the advertising and mobile industries including incentivized advertising, brand advertising, and hybrid/cloud solutions. Recent projects leverage data analysis techniques to convert data to actionable information and the system design required to ensure consistent and reliable pipeline health. The systems are used to monitor revenue, alert on data quality, support CI/CD automated rollback feedback, metrics for customer satisfaction, and anomaly detection impacting business metrics. As a leader in an organization that is constantly learning and innovating in the it is necessary to cultivate the interests of the team, encourage initiative at the individual contributor level, and walk the talk in implementing continuous process improvement.

Brian has worked in IT as a software developer, architect, and manager for the last 15 years, and is thrilled that every one of those years has been different. J2EE, embedded C/JNI, FDA Regulated systems, BI & Data warehouse architecture and management, system integration, MDM & data governance, and Enterprise Architecture are the highlights. Whether focused on creating, refining, controlling, analyzing & aggregating, discovering, moving, designing & leading, or linking to strategy… in each role turning bits and bytes into value has been at the core. His current adventure has me assembling frameworks, tools, and processes to extract value from the massive data streams produced by Auris’ robotic platforms.

Francesco Diaz joined Insight in 2015 and is responsible for the cloud solutions & services area for a few countries in the EMEA region. In his previous work experience, Francesco worked at Microsoft for several years, in Services, Partner, and Cloud & Enterprise divisions. He is passionate about data and cloud, and he speaks about these topics at events and conferences.

Dr. Jing Pan received her PhD from the University of Georgia, where she was also a recipient of the Graduate School Dean's Award. She is a Data Scientist/User Experience Researcher in the Customer Intelligence team at Fanatics Inc., an omni-channel global leader in sports merchandise. She designs modeling process for customer facing data products such as recommendation system for over 400 fanatics managed e-commerce sites including fanatics.com, NBA.com, NFLshop.com, etc. In her previous position as a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at the then 2nd largest e-commerce company, Staples Inc., she was awarded the prestigious company-wide Inventor of the Year Award for her contribution to coupon, pricing and recommendation systems in both B2B and B2C channels. She used to be a neuroscientist with SCI/SSCI indexed publications and served as reviewers for SCI indexed scientific journals. She builds data products that apply psychological principles at scale. In her spare time, she organizes a machine learning forums for a non-profit organization and is an participant of WIN (Women Info Network) for closing gender gaps in tech.

Satya is the VP, Engineering, Marketing Platform at Neustar and is responsible for product development of Marketing Analytical Platform. He has more than 20 years of knowledge and experience in distributed computing and real-time analytics.

Prior to Neustar, Satya was led engineering at MarketShare, co-founded JovianDATA and led Engineering, Prior to jovianDATA, he managed the real time analytics backend at Celequest, which was acquired by Cognos. was one of the lead engineers of the cluster management group at 3PARData Inc, and a founding member of the Distributed Database group where he was responsible for architecting and implementing major aspects of the Sybase distributed database.

Satya holds a Master’s in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, with emphasis in databases and compilers. Satya holds several patents in distributed computing and has been a presenter at several conferences.

Kevin leads Qubole’s go to market functions including marketing, sales, service, support, and alliances. Kevin brings more than 20 years of experience in a variety of leadership roles in both privates and public software companies such as SkillsVillage, Agile Software, Ooyala, PeopleSoft and Oracle. Kevin enjoys leading teams that help customers leverage new technologies to drive measurable results within their organizations.

Jose Villacís has been in the Analytics, Big Data, and Enterprise Performance Management fields for 18 years, currently leading Qubole’s Product Marketing team. Prior to Qubole, José spent 10 years at Oracle, most recently heading the Product Marketing team for Oracle Analytics Cloud. He also held various roles in Global Market Development, Market Intelligence, and Product Marketing at Oracle, Hyperion Solutions, Business Objects, and img / Syntel. His technology experience spans data visualization, Big Data and BI platforms, EPM applications, master data management, and Engineered Systems. José holds an MBA from the University of Oregon; a Management Science graduate degree, and a BBA from PUCE.

Rajat Venkatesh is a Sr. Director of Engineering at Qubole. He leads two SQL-on-Hadoop technologies-Presto and Apache Hive for both ad-hoc and ETL use cases. Prior to Qubole, he was an early engineer at Vertica and worked across the stack to build a distributed columnar analytic database.

Ankita specializes in User Experience Design and Design Thinking at Qubole. She has previously worked with firms like SAP Labs and Symantec and has a rich background in designing effective and engaging Enterprise Applications across Business Intelligence, Analytics and Information Management.

She is a certified Design Thinking Coach and holds a Bachelor of Design from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Venkat Sowrirajan works on Apache Spark at Qubole. Also worked on other Hadoop projects like Apache YARN at Qubole. Before Qubole, he worked at MapR. He also holds a Masters in Computer Science at the Arizona State University.