Join us for 3 DAYS of cutting-edge technical talks from the brightest minds in data & AI.
Join the Global Data Community
Each year, we bring together the sharpest minds in data engineering, ML and AI to showcase brilliant work. Join us this year as we bring Data Council back to the Bay Area Apr 22-24.
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100+ Speakers
Learn from data & AI heroes at top companies as they explain their architectures, discoveries and solutions in detail. We're adding new speakers regularly, so be sure to check back!
All
Data Eng & Infrastructure
Data Sci & Algos
ML OPs & Platforms
Analytics & BI
Lightning Talks
Workshops
Keynotes
Databases
Foundation Models
AI Engineering
GenAI Applications
AI & Data Culture
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Hannes Mühleisen
Co-Creator of DuckDB
DuckDB Labs
Co-Creator of DuckDB
DuckDB Labs
Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database management system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs. He is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud University Nijmegen.
- Analytics & BI
Lloyd Tabb
Founder/Former CTO - Looker & Co-creator of Malloy
Meta
Founder/Former CTO - Looker & Co-creator of Malloy
Meta
Lloyd Tabb, a tech pioneer, revolutionized internet and data usage over 30 years. After working as Borland's database architect, he was Principal Engineer at Netscape during the browser wars and helped found Mozilla.org. He later founded Looker, acquired by Google in 2019, which helped define the Modern Data Stack. Now at Meta, he leads Malloy, an experimental language that reimagines SQL with coding libraries, recently transferred to the Linux Foundation. The project has expanded to support Presto, Trino, Snowflake, and other SQL dialects, while adding features like parameterized sources and visual query builders.
- Data Sci & Algos
Hadley Wickham
Chief Scientist
Posit
Chief Scientist
Posit
Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at Posit, where he shapes the future of data science tools and workflows. Creator of the tidyverse and numerous influential R packages, he's transformed how people work with data in R. A statistics Ph.D. from Iowa State, he combines deep technical expertise with a passion for making data science more accessible. When not coding, he's teaching at Rice University or advancing data visualization techniques through his widely-cited research.
- GenAI Applications
Joseph Gonzalez
Professor
RunLLM & UC Berkeley
Professor
RunLLM & UC Berkeley
Joseph Gonzalez is a Computer Science Professor at UC Berkeley, the co-director of the RISE and Sky Computing Labs, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) group. He leads the Large Models Systems (LM-Sys) and Gorilla projects which have significantly advanced open research in large language models and their supporting systems. Joseph is also co-founder and Head of AI at RunLLM.com. His research addresses problems in data systems, large language models, scalable machine learning, computer vision, robotics, autonomous driving, and graph analytics. Prior to joining Berkeley, Gonzalez co-founded Turi Inc (formerly GraphLab) based on his thesis work. Gonzalez’s innovative work has earned him significant recognition, including the Okawa Research Grant, the NSF Expedition Award, the VLDB Test-of-Time award, and NSF Early CAREER Award.
- AI Engineering
Charles Frye
Developer Advocate
Modal Labs
Developer Advocate
Modal Labs
Charles Frye is a Developer Advocate at Modal Labs with expertise in deep learning and neural networks. A UC Berkeley Ph.D. graduate in Neuroscience, he transitioned from biology to computer science and statistics. He previously served as a Deep Learning Educator at The Full Stack and Weights & Biases, where he created educational content on machine learning and Python programming. He's known for his talent in explaining complex quantitative concepts to non-experts.
- Analytics & BI
Mike Driscoll
Co-Founder & CTO
Rill Data
Co-Founder & CTO
Rill Data
Mike has spent over two decades as a technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. He’s currently co-founder and CEO of Rill, a cloud service for operational intelligence. Previously he founded Metamarkets (acquired by Snap, Inc. in 2017), a real-time analytics platform for digital ad firms, and CustomInk.com a leader in custom apparel online. Mike was also a founding partner at the venture capital firm DCVC, which has invested over $2B+ in assets in deep tech. He began his career as a software engineer for the Human Genome Project and later received a Ph.D. in computational biology.
- Data Sci & Algos
Bryan Bischof
Director of Engineering: AI
Hex
Director of Engineering: AI
Hex
Bryan Bischof leads AI engineering at Hex, where he builds data science assistants that help people do their best work. A mathematician by training (with a Ph.D. studying quantum groups), he's known for applying geometric techniques to real-world ML problems. When not directing engineering teams, he teaches data science at Rutgers and writes about recommendation systems. His work combines deep technical expertise with a focus on practical applications.
- Databases
Andy Pavlo
Assistant Professor of Databaseology
Carnegie Melon University
Assistant Professor of Databaseology
Carnegie Melon University
Andy Pavlo is an Associate Professor with Indefinite Tenure of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His (unnatural) infatuation with database systems has earned him several distinctions, such as VLDB Early Career Award (2021) and NSF CAREER (2019). He also was the CEO & co-founder of the OtterTune database tuning start-up (2020-2024), but it died an untimely death. Andy earned his Ph.D. in 2013 at Brown University under Stan Zdonik and Mike Stonebraker.
- Databases
Tanya Bragin
VP Product
ClickHouse
VP Product
ClickHouse
Tanya Bragin leads product at ClickHouse, a popular open source analytical database. She has over 20 years of experience in the data space, ranging from data analytics, to search, to security and network analytics. She started her career in consulting and sales engineering, and spent the last decade and a half growing product organizations from early stages to maturity at three data analytics startups, ExtraHop, Elastic, and now ClickHouse.
- Lightning Talks
Pedram Navid
Head of Data Engineering & DevRel
Dagster Labs
Head of Data Engineering & DevRel
Dagster Labs
Pedram is the Head of Data Engineering and DevRel at Dagster Labs where he manages the devrel, marketing, and data teams with the goal of helping developers be more successful with Dagster. He has built Dagster integrations, the Ask AI agent, and rewritten docs from the ground up. Prior to Dagster, he was the Head of Data at Hightouch, is an avid bird watcher, and a father of twin girls.
- AI Engineering
Shreya Rajpal
Co-Founder & CEO
Guardrails
Co-Founder & CEO
Guardrails
Shreya Rajpal is the CEO of Guardrails AI, an open source platform developed to ensure increased safety, reliability and robustness of large language models in real-world applications. Her expertise spans a decade in the field of machine learning and AI. Most recently, she was the founding engineer at Predibase, where she led the ML infrastructure team. In earlier roles, she was part of the cross-functional ML team within Apple's Special Projects Group and developed computer vision models for autonomous driving perception systems at Drive.ai.
- Databases
Paul Dix
Founder & CTO
InfluxData
Founder & CTO
InfluxData
Paul is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for Addison Wesley’s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.
- Databases
Etienne Dilocker
CTO
Weaviate
CTO
Weaviate
Etienne Dilocker is Co-Founder and CTO of Weaviate, where he leads the development of vector search technology. A veteran software engineer with over 15 years of experience, he specializes in building fast, reliable, and scalable systems. He regularly speaks at AI conferences about production use cases in vector search and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), leading a team of 90+ engineers.
- Workshops
Samuel Colvin
Founder
Pydantic
Founder
Pydantic
Samuel Colvin is a Python and Rust developer and Founder of Pydantic Inc., backed by Sequoia to build Pydantic Logfire — developer first observability. The Pydantic library, which he created is downloaded over 280M/month and is a dependency of virtually every GenAI Python libraries including the OpenAI SDK, the Anthropic SDK, the Google Gen AI SDK, Langchain and LlamaIndex.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Mickey Liu
Software Engineer
Notion
Software Engineer
Notion
Mickey Liu is a software engineer on the AI & Data Platform team at Notion, helping build and scale data needs for Notion AI. Before Notion, Mickey worked on the ML Platform team at Twitter building the Feature Management system to enable ML model training and serving use cases for ads and recommendations.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Simon Eskildsen
Co-Founder
Turbopuffer
Co-Founder
Turbopuffer
Simon Hørup Eskildsen is co-founder of turbopuffer, a fast search engine on object storage. Previously, Simon was a principal engineer at Shopify, scaling the system from 1K to 1M requests per second. When time allows, he writes about napkin math on his or the turbopuffer blog and maintains a popular reference on the topic on Github: sirupsen/napkin-math.
- GenAI Applications
Mitul Tiwari
Co-founder & CTO
Stealth
Co-founder & CTO
Stealth
Mitul Tiwari is CTO and Co-founder of a stealth AI startup. Until recently he was a Director of AI and Machine Learning Engineering at ServiceNow leading natural language technologies group. Earlier he was CTO and Co-founder of Passage AI (acquired by Servicenow). His expertise lies in building data-driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems. Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) on web-scale text categorization, and its applications. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as ACL, AAAI, KDD, WWW, RecSys, VLDB, SIGIR, CIKM, and SPAA.
- Data Sci & Algos
Timothy Chan
Head of Data
Statsig
Head of Data
Statsig
Timothy Chan is an experienced data science professional, currently serving as the Head of Data at Statsig. This cutting-edge platform provides product observability and experimentation services to top companies such as Notion, RecRoom, WhatNot, and OfferUp. Before joining Statsig, Timothy spent 5 years as a Data Scientist at Facebook (now Meta), where he was involved in projects across Facebook App and Reality Labs. Before venturing into the tech industry, Timothy worked in biotech, researching treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, and Cancer. He holds a PhD in Chemistry and an MBA in Entrepreneurship.
- Lightning Talks
Brenna Buuck
Developer Evangelist
MinIO
Developer Evangelist
MinIO
Brenna Buuck is the subject matter expert at MinIO for databases and datalakes. A data engineer turned Developer Evangelist, she is passionate about coding, data and learning. She endeavors to inspire and educate other developers about the latest tools and technologies with the goal of helping them build amazing things through code, tutorials, speaking and writing. She has her undergraduate degree from UC San Diego and her graduate degree from San Diego State.
- Workshops
Ofer Mendelevitch
Head of Developer Relations
Vectara
Head of Developer Relations
Vectara
Ofer Mendelevitch leads developer relations at Vectara. He has extensive hands-on experience in machine learning, data science and big data systems across multiple industries, and has focused on developing products using large language models since 2019. Prior to Vectara he built and led data science teams at Syntegra, Helix, Lendup, Hortonworks and Yahoo! Ofer holds a B.Sc. in computer science from Technion and M.Sc. in EE from Tel Aviv university, and is the author of "Practical data science with Hadoop" (Addison Wesley).
- AI & Data Culture
Lindsay Murphy
Director, Head of Data
Hiive
Director, Head of Data
Hiive
Lindsay Murphy is a data leader with 13 years of industry experience. She is currently a Director and Head of Data at Hiive, the marketplace for private stock. Before Hiive, Lindsay led data teams at Secoda, Maple and BenchSci. Lindsay is also a co-organizer of the Toronto Modern Data Stack Meetup, an instructor of Advanced dbt with Uplimit and the creator/host of the Women Lead Data podcast.
- AI & Data Culture
Colleen Tartow
Field CTO & Head of Strategy
VAST Data
Field CTO & Head of Strategy
VAST Data
Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. is Field CTO and Head of Strategy at VAST Data and has 20+ years of experience in data, analytics, engineering, and consulting. Adept at assisting organizations in deriving value from a data-driven culture, she has successfully led diverse data, engineering, and analytics teams through the development of complex global data management solutions and architecting enterprise data systems. Her demonstrated excellence in data, engineering, analytics, and diversity leadership makes her a trusted senior advisor among executives. An experienced speaker, author, valued mentor and startup advisor, Colleen holds degrees in astrophysics and lives in Massachusetts.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Jake Thomas
Manager, Data Foundations
Okta
Manager, Data Foundations
Okta
Jake currently manages the Data Foundations team at Okta after transitioning from Principal Engineer on Okta's Defensive Cyber Operations team. He previously led data platform teams at Shopify and CarGurus, has taught various O'Reilly courses, and regularly contributes to data-oriented OSS projects.
- Lightning Talks
Tobias Lunt
Co-Founder & Data Scientist
Development Data Lab
Co-Founder & Data Scientist
Development Data Lab
Tobias is co-founder and Head of Data at Development Data Lab, where his mission is to deliver insights and open data to fight poverty and improve policy around the world. He leads data engineering, analytical, geospatial, and visualization efforts at DDL. In a past life, he was a Fulbrighter to Ethiopia working on agricultural development alongside rural farmers.
- AI Engineering
Marck Vaisman
Global AI Solutions Architect
Microsoft
Global AI Solutions Architect
Microsoft
Marck is a data science expert with 15 years of experience, currently aiding customers in harnessing Azure for their data workloads. As an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and George Washington University, he integrates industry knowledge into courses like Big Data and Cloud Computing. He's also the founder of Data Community DC, promoting data science in the Washington DC area. An advocate for R programming, Marck has authored several data science publications, including "Analyzing the Analyzers". He holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Elias DeFaria
Co-Founder & VP of Product
SDF
Co-Founder & VP of Product
SDF
Elias DeFaria is the cofounder and VP of Product at SDF Labs, a cutting-edge transformation layer that combines dbt-like capabilities with native SQL understanding and execution. He leads product strategy and development, collaborating closely with customers and engineers to deliver the next generation of data transformation tools.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Sumedh Sakdeo
Senior Staff Software Engineer
LinkedIn
Senior Staff Software Engineer
LinkedIn
Sumedh Sakdeo is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn. He has 15+ years of experience working in data infrastructure. He previously contributed to a log-structured file system at Tintri and led data infrastructure, engineering, and visualization for Lyft's Autonomous Vehicles division. Notably, at LinkedIn, he spearheaded the development of OpenHouse, an open source control plane for Apache Iceberg Tables, enabling efficient table maintenance and data layout optimization at scale.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Jesus Camacho
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
Jesús Camacho Rodríguez is a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, leading a team focused on query optimization and processing for Fabric Data Warehouse. Previously, he led a team in the Gray Systems Lab (GSL), driving innovation in data systems performance, interoperability, and benchmarking across Azure Data's product portfolio. Before Microsoft, he worked at Cloudera on query optimization for SQL data warehouse engines. A member of the Apache Software Foundation, he has made significant contributions to open-source projects like Apache Calcite and Apache Hive, and, more recently, has focused on projects in the table formats space, including LST-Bench and Apache XTable (incubating). He holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Sud and Inria, France.
- Data Sci & Algos
Ciro Greco
Founder
Bauplan
Founder
Bauplan
Ciro Greco is the Founder and CEO of bauplan, a zero-copy, data-first FaaS platform launched in 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, Linguistics and Neuroscience from the University of Milano-Bicocca. Previously, he co-founded Tooso, an AI-powered commerce search company acquired by Coveo in 2019, where he later served as VP of Artificial Intelligence. His expertise spans AI, linguistics, and data engineering, with a focus on making cloud data pipelines more efficient.
- Data Sci & Algos
Joseph Powers
Principal Data Scientist
Intuit
Principal Data Scientist
Intuit
Joseph is a Principal Data Scientist at Intuit, where he has lead Experimentation and Advanced Analytics. He is highly interested in experimentation, designing for large effects, simulation studies, Bayesian modeling, optimal stopping and decision theory. He will be very glad if you approach him to discuss any of these topics during the conference. Previous careers include 7 years as a custom furniture maker and a Psychology PhD from Stanford. When he is not programming or playing dad he enjoys woodworking, cooking and surfing.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Marcel Kornacker
Co-Founder & CTO
Pixeltable
Co-Founder & CTO
Pixeltable
Marcel Kornacker is currently CTO and Co-Founder at Pixeltable and is notably known as the founder of Apache Impala and co-founder of Apache Parquet. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he studied databases under Joe Hellerstein. His career includes founding several startups, including Blink Computing, which provided data lake analytics as a service. He has also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at both Sutter Hill Ventures and Coatue Management. Kornacker's expertise spans databases, data analytics, and open-source technologies.
- Databases
Marco Slot
Software Imagineer
Crunchy Data
Software Imagineer
Crunchy Data
Marco Slot is a Software Imagineer at Crunchy Data, where he's building Crunchy Data Warehouse, a modern PostgreSQL-based solution. He previously served as Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, architecting Citus for Azure Cosmos DB, and was Principal Engineer at Citus Data before its acquisition by Microsoft. Slot holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin and a Master's in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
- Lightning Talks
Anil Sadineni
Principal Software Engineer
1upHealth
Principal Software Engineer
1upHealth
A self-driven technology enthusiast with a deep passion for distributed data systems, Anil Sadineni embodies a continuous learning philosophy and a growth mindset to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of data engineering. He currently leads the architecture, design, and development of the Data Platform at 1upHealth, harnessing a modern data stack to tackle complex challenges in healthcare data interoperability and beyond.
- Lightning Talks
Saif Ur-Rehman
Data Engineering Lead
Basecamp Research
Data Engineering Lead
Basecamp Research
Dr. Saif Ur-Rehman is Principal Data Engineer at Basecamp Research, where he leads a team developing strategic data pipelines and bioinformatics systems that have facilitated the production of state-of-the-art models for protein folding, annotation, and generation. His work focuses on constructing datasets for model training and fine-tuning while leveraging computational biology to build sustainable solutions. His expertise spans cancer biology and machine learning, developed through his postdoctoral work at the Institute of Cancer Research and his bioinformatics experience at EMBL-EBI and Genomics England after earning his PhD in Computational Biology from the University of St Andrews.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Jonathan Jin
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Hinge
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Hinge
Jonathan Jin is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Hinge where, as a member of the AI Platform Core team, he helps democratize the cost-efficient, robust, and scalable use of AI within the company. He has previously worked on production-scale ML platform and infrastructure at Spotify, NVIDIA, and Twitter. Prior to diving down the ML rabbit-hole, he worked on observability and SRE infrastructure at Uber. When he's not debugging inference pipelines, he enjoys cooking, literature, and plot-heavy JRPGs.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Madison Faulkner
Principal & Head of Data Science
NEA
Principal & Head of Data Science
NEA
Madison is an investor at NEA focused on early-stage data, infrastructure, developer tools, data science, and AI/ML. She also leads the data and AI platform internally to leverage data & AI for investment and firm decision-making. Previously, she invested at Costanoa Ventures where she worked closely with Delphina.ai, Probabl.ai, Mindtrip.ai, Noteable.io (acq by Confluent), Rafay.co, and others. Prior to investing, Madison was Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at Thrasio, Head of Data Science at Greycroft, and held several data science positions at Facebook working on embeddings, knowledge graphs and deep learning infrastructure with FAIR. Madison received a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford and grew up in Colorado performing in rodeos.
- Data Sci & Algos
Wenjing Zheng
Data Science Manager
Roblox
Data Science Manager
Roblox
Wenjing Zheng, Data Science Manager at Roblox, leads the Ecosystem and Learning Platforms team. With dual PhDs from UC Berkeley and Université Paris Cité, she brings over a decade of experience in causal machine learning. Previously at Netflix, she led experimentation and ads growth initiatives. Her expertise spans causal inference, ML, and data science.
- Analytics & BI
Hamilton Ulmer
UI Engineer & Designer
MotherDuck
UI Engineer & Designer
MotherDuck
Hamilton Ulmer is currently a designer and software engineer at MotherDuck. Previously he was head of application engineering at Rill Data, where he built conversation-fast dashboard tools with DuckDB, and spent several years at Mozilla working on projects including Iodide, the WebAssembly-powered notebook environment that gave rise to Pyodide, the popular WebAssembly port of CPython. Hamilton's work pushes the boundaries of databases and web browsers to make data analysis feel more natural and engaging.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Vignesh Chadramohan
Engineering Manager
Doordash
Engineering Manager
Doordash
Vignesh Chandramohan leads data engineering at DoorDash, architecting real-time analytics and data lake solutions. A Microsoft veteran with 17+ years of experience, he was instrumental in developing Azure Stream Analytics and Microsoft Fabric's stream processing capabilities. Currently focused on building scalable data infrastructure using technologies like Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Flink. Also maintains SlateDB, an open-source embedded database built for object storage.
- AI & Data Culture
Doron Porat
Co-Founder & CEO
Lakeway
Co-Founder & CEO
Lakeway
Doron is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lakeway, enabling modern data platforms to scale efficiently and drive greater business impact through operational excellence. With over a decade of experience leading data and platform engineering teams, Doron is a recognized public speaker and podcaster, deeply engaged with the global data community. She brings a unique perspective on fostering collaboration and innovation at the intersection of infrastructure, people, and processes. When she needs to reset, you’ll likely find her fiddling with weeds in her garden or online shopping for home accessories.
- AI & Data Culture
Eevamaija Virtanen
Founder & Senior Data Engineer
Invinite & Helsinki Data Week
Founder & Senior Data Engineer
Invinite & Helsinki Data Week
Eevamaija Virtanen is Co-Founder of Invinite, building scalable data solutions for healthcare. A respected data engineering leader known for her human-centered approach to building data products. Founded Helsinki Data Week and DataTribe to foster tech community growth in Finland. Board Member of TIVIA shaping Finland's ICT landscape. Advocates for pragmatic, business-focused data solutions.
- Workshops
Dr. Greg Michaelson
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Zerve AI
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Zerve AI
Dr. Greg Michaelson is Co-Founder of Zerve AI, building next-generation tools for data science and LLMs. Previously Chief Customer Officer at DataRobot, where he helped pioneer automated machine learning. An Applied Statistics Ph.D. who led analytics at Travelers and served as VP of Quantitative Risk Analysis at Regions Bank. Known for bridging technical and business worlds while scaling AI solutions.
- AI Engineering
Rachel Lee Nabors
Developer Experience Lead
AgentQL
Developer Experience Lead
AgentQL
Rachel Lee Nabors is a developer experience leader known for launching award-winning developer portals, notably with Meta's React team. They have shaped technical documentation at Mozilla (MDN) and W3C, while building developer education teams across FAANG and startups. Their career spans roles at AWS Amplify, Meta, and Booking.com. Currently a Fractional Developer Experience Leader in London, Rachel helps companies create effective developer advocacy and documentation programs.
- AI Engineering
Tengyu Ma
Co-Founder & CEO
Voyage AI
Co-Founder & CEO
Voyage AI
Tengyu Ma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Voyage AI and also an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and B.E. from Tsinghua University. His research interests include topics in machine learning, algorithms and their theory, such as deep learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, pre-training / foundation models, robustness, non-convex optimization, distributed optimization, and high-dimensional statistics.. He is a recipient of ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the Sloan Fellowship, and the NSF CAREER Award.
- AI Engineering
Eno Reyes
CTO
Factory
CTO
Factory
Eno Reyes is co-founder and CTO of Factory, an organization building an AI platform for accelerating the entire software development lifecycle. He was previously an ML engineer at Hugging Face, where he worked on enterprise LLM deployment, fine-tuning, and productionization. He was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in AI.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Nikita Vemuri
Software Engineer
Anyscale
Software Engineer
Anyscale
Nikita Vemuri is a software engineer at Anyscale, where she focuses on developing observability features across Ray and the Anyscale platform to help developers debug and monitor their large scale AI workloads. She joined Anyscale as one of the early engineers and has contributed to multiple initiatives across the platform stack over the last 4 years. As a UC Berkeley grad, she earned both her bachelor's and master's in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and conducted research at Berkeley’s RISE Lab.
- GenAI Applications
Lin Qiao
Co-Founder & CEO
Fireworks AI
Co-Founder & CEO
Fireworks AI
Lin Qiao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fireworks AI, an AI production and inference platform helping enterprises customize, deploy and run state-of-the-art generative AI models and build compound AI systems. Prior to Fireworks, Lin led a team of over 300 engineers as head of Meta's PyTorch. She began her engineering career at IBM in 2003, followed by a stint as a tech lead at LinkedIn, where she built the company's data life cycle management platform. Lin holds a PhD in computer science from UC Santa Barbara.
- GenAI Applications
Ethan Brown
Director, Data & Applied Science
Twitch / AWS
Director, Data & Applied Science
Twitch / AWS
Ethan leads data and applied science at Amazon IVS, the video service that powers Twitch, and has held similar roles for the better part of a decade. He is a practicing-turned-armchair physicist, having spent the first half of his career developing algorithms to simulate quantum mechanics on super computers.
- Analytics & BI
Ganesh Ramanarayanan
VP Engineering
Hex
VP Engineering
Hex
Ganesh Ramanarayanan is VP of Engineering at Hex, where he leads the team building the future of data analytics. Previously, he led platform engineering at Notion and spent eight years scaling Pure Storage from startup to public company, growing engineering from 40 to 600+ people. A builder of high-performing teams, he holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.
- Lightning Talks
John Bagnall
Senior Data Product Manager
Matillion
Senior Data Product Manager
Matillion
John Bagnall is the Senior Product Manager at Matillion where he leads the development of data governance and quality solutions. Previously, he served as Product Owner at NEC Software Solutions and held roles as a Software Developer at Mainline and Data Analyst at Secret Spot. With over a decade of hands-on experience, John specializes in making complex data systems more intuitive and user-friendly, ensuring technical solutions align with real business needs.
- Lightning Talks
CL Kao
Founder
Recce
Founder
Recce
CL Kao is the CEO and founder of Recce, bringing CI/CD and change validations to data-centric systems. Prior to Recce, he developed GPU-cluster management tools that empowered the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer to efficiently run their data science and AI workloads. Earlier in his career, he created a precursor to Git, aiding companies like Apple in managing large-scale codebases. He also co-founded g0v (gov-zero), a civic tech community dedicated to tackling social and democratic challenges through open data and open source collaboration.
- Lightning Talks
Avi Press
CEO
Scarf
CEO
Scarf
Avi Press is the founder and CEO of Scarf, where he promotes open source sustainability through responsible usage analytics practices. A UC Berkeley graduate, he's become a leading voice in making open source analytics more mainstream and data-driven. Prior to founding Scarf in 2019, he worked as a software engineer at companies like Pandora and Backbone. Avi is also a board member of the Haskell Foundation, and a host on the Hacking Open Source Business Podcast.
- Lightning Talks
Michael Cohen
Global Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Plus Company
Global Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Plus Company
Michael is a globally recognized leader in AI and data-driven business transformation, known for developing AIOS, an intelligent marketing system at Plus that optimizes customer journey analysis and marketing ROI. A former NYU Stern marketing professor, his research spans predictive computation, marketing strategies, and consumer behavior. He has launched successful AI products focused on user safety, privacy, and marketing optimization. His work on explainable prediction and data synthesis, particularly with incomplete data, has been featured in major publications like LA Times and AdAge, and he frequently speaks at prestigious events including The Nantucket Project and ANA Masters of Marketing.
- Workshops
Dylan Perez Neider
Sr. Solutions Engineer
Sigma Computing
Sr. Solutions Engineer
Sigma Computing
Dylan Perez Neider is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sigma Computing. Over his three years at Sigma, he has guided hundreds of customers in building innovative business solutions that go beyond the limitations of legacy BI tools. Passionate about empowering employees of all technical and non-technical backgrounds, Perez Neider champions data-driven decision making and self-sufficiency: core principles of Sigma's mission.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Anant Agarwal
Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Lead
Instacart
Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Lead
Instacart
Anant Agarwal is a Staff Software Engineer and Technical Lead in Instacart's Data Infrastructure group, leading initiatives for developer and data productivity at scale. During his 4+ years at Instacart, he has developed mission-critical distributed platforms and orchestration systems that power the company's data pipelines, workflow engines, and services ecosystem, processing millions of workflows daily. Previously at VMware, as Staff Software Engineer and one of the early engineers on VMware Cloud on AWS, he built high availability and distributed resource scheduling systems for hybrid cloud environments.
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100+ Speakers
Learn from data & AI heroes at top companies as they explain their architectures, discoveries and solutions in detail. We're adding new speakers regularly, so be sure to check back!
All
Data Eng & Infrastructure
Data Sci & Algos
ML OPs & Platforms
Analytics & BI
Lightning Talks
Workshops
Keynotes
Databases
Foundation Models
AI Engineering
GenAI Applications
AI & Data Culture
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Hannes Mühleisen
Co-Creator of DuckDB
DuckDB Labs
Co-Creator of DuckDB
DuckDB Labs
Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database management system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs. He is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud University Nijmegen.
- Analytics & BI
Lloyd Tabb
Founder/Former CTO - Looker & Co-creator of Malloy
Meta
Founder/Former CTO - Looker & Co-creator of Malloy
Meta
Lloyd Tabb, a tech pioneer, revolutionized internet and data usage over 30 years. After working as Borland's database architect, he was Principal Engineer at Netscape during the browser wars and helped found Mozilla.org. He later founded Looker, acquired by Google in 2019, which helped define the Modern Data Stack. Now at Meta, he leads Malloy, an experimental language that reimagines SQL with coding libraries, recently transferred to the Linux Foundation. The project has expanded to support Presto, Trino, Snowflake, and other SQL dialects, while adding features like parameterized sources and visual query builders.
- Data Sci & Algos
Hadley Wickham
Chief Scientist
Posit
Chief Scientist
Posit
Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at Posit, where he shapes the future of data science tools and workflows. Creator of the tidyverse and numerous influential R packages, he's transformed how people work with data in R. A statistics Ph.D. from Iowa State, he combines deep technical expertise with a passion for making data science more accessible. When not coding, he's teaching at Rice University or advancing data visualization techniques through his widely-cited research.
- GenAI Applications
Joseph Gonzalez
Professor
RunLLM & UC Berkeley
Professor
RunLLM & UC Berkeley
Joseph Gonzalez is a Computer Science Professor at UC Berkeley, the co-director of the RISE and Sky Computing Labs, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) group. He leads the Large Models Systems (LM-Sys) and Gorilla projects which have significantly advanced open research in large language models and their supporting systems. Joseph is also co-founder and Head of AI at RunLLM.com. His research addresses problems in data systems, large language models, scalable machine learning, computer vision, robotics, autonomous driving, and graph analytics. Prior to joining Berkeley, Gonzalez co-founded Turi Inc (formerly GraphLab) based on his thesis work. Gonzalez’s innovative work has earned him significant recognition, including the Okawa Research Grant, the NSF Expedition Award, the VLDB Test-of-Time award, and NSF Early CAREER Award.
- AI Engineering
Charles Frye
Developer Advocate
Modal Labs
Developer Advocate
Modal Labs
Charles Frye is a Developer Advocate at Modal Labs with expertise in deep learning and neural networks. A UC Berkeley Ph.D. graduate in Neuroscience, he transitioned from biology to computer science and statistics. He previously served as a Deep Learning Educator at The Full Stack and Weights & Biases, where he created educational content on machine learning and Python programming. He's known for his talent in explaining complex quantitative concepts to non-experts.
- Analytics & BI
Mike Driscoll
Co-Founder & CTO
Rill Data
Co-Founder & CTO
Rill Data
Mike has spent over two decades as a technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. He’s currently co-founder and CEO of Rill, a cloud service for operational intelligence. Previously he founded Metamarkets (acquired by Snap, Inc. in 2017), a real-time analytics platform for digital ad firms, and CustomInk.com a leader in custom apparel online. Mike was also a founding partner at the venture capital firm DCVC, which has invested over $2B+ in assets in deep tech. He began his career as a software engineer for the Human Genome Project and later received a Ph.D. in computational biology.
- Data Sci & Algos
Bryan Bischof
Director of Engineering: AI
Hex
Director of Engineering: AI
Hex
Bryan Bischof leads AI engineering at Hex, where he builds data science assistants that help people do their best work. A mathematician by training (with a Ph.D. studying quantum groups), he's known for applying geometric techniques to real-world ML problems. When not directing engineering teams, he teaches data science at Rutgers and writes about recommendation systems. His work combines deep technical expertise with a focus on practical applications.
- Databases
Andy Pavlo
Assistant Professor of Databaseology
Carnegie Melon University
Assistant Professor of Databaseology
Carnegie Melon University
Andy Pavlo is an Associate Professor with Indefinite Tenure of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His (unnatural) infatuation with database systems has earned him several distinctions, such as VLDB Early Career Award (2021) and NSF CAREER (2019). He also was the CEO & co-founder of the OtterTune database tuning start-up (2020-2024), but it died an untimely death. Andy earned his Ph.D. in 2013 at Brown University under Stan Zdonik and Mike Stonebraker.
- Databases
Tanya Bragin
VP Product
ClickHouse
VP Product
ClickHouse
Tanya Bragin leads product at ClickHouse, a popular open source analytical database. She has over 20 years of experience in the data space, ranging from data analytics, to search, to security and network analytics. She started her career in consulting and sales engineering, and spent the last decade and a half growing product organizations from early stages to maturity at three data analytics startups, ExtraHop, Elastic, and now ClickHouse.
- Lightning Talks
Pedram Navid
Head of Data Engineering & DevRel
Dagster Labs
Head of Data Engineering & DevRel
Dagster Labs
Pedram is the Head of Data Engineering and DevRel at Dagster Labs where he manages the devrel, marketing, and data teams with the goal of helping developers be more successful with Dagster. He has built Dagster integrations, the Ask AI agent, and rewritten docs from the ground up. Prior to Dagster, he was the Head of Data at Hightouch, is an avid bird watcher, and a father of twin girls.
- AI Engineering
Shreya Rajpal
Co-Founder & CEO
Guardrails
Co-Founder & CEO
Guardrails
Shreya Rajpal is the CEO of Guardrails AI, an open source platform developed to ensure increased safety, reliability and robustness of large language models in real-world applications. Her expertise spans a decade in the field of machine learning and AI. Most recently, she was the founding engineer at Predibase, where she led the ML infrastructure team. In earlier roles, she was part of the cross-functional ML team within Apple's Special Projects Group and developed computer vision models for autonomous driving perception systems at Drive.ai.
- Databases
Paul Dix
Founder & CTO
InfluxData
Founder & CTO
InfluxData
Paul is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for Addison Wesley’s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.
- Databases
Etienne Dilocker
CTO
Weaviate
CTO
Weaviate
Etienne Dilocker is Co-Founder and CTO of Weaviate, where he leads the development of vector search technology. A veteran software engineer with over 15 years of experience, he specializes in building fast, reliable, and scalable systems. He regularly speaks at AI conferences about production use cases in vector search and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), leading a team of 90+ engineers.
- Workshops
Samuel Colvin
Founder
Pydantic
Founder
Pydantic
Samuel Colvin is a Python and Rust developer and Founder of Pydantic Inc., backed by Sequoia to build Pydantic Logfire — developer first observability. The Pydantic library, which he created is downloaded over 280M/month and is a dependency of virtually every GenAI Python libraries including the OpenAI SDK, the Anthropic SDK, the Google Gen AI SDK, Langchain and LlamaIndex.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Mickey Liu
Software Engineer
Notion
Software Engineer
Notion
Mickey Liu is a software engineer on the AI & Data Platform team at Notion, helping build and scale data needs for Notion AI. Before Notion, Mickey worked on the ML Platform team at Twitter building the Feature Management system to enable ML model training and serving use cases for ads and recommendations.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Simon Eskildsen
Co-Founder
Turbopuffer
Co-Founder
Turbopuffer
Simon Hørup Eskildsen is co-founder of turbopuffer, a fast search engine on object storage. Previously, Simon was a principal engineer at Shopify, scaling the system from 1K to 1M requests per second. When time allows, he writes about napkin math on his or the turbopuffer blog and maintains a popular reference on the topic on Github: sirupsen/napkin-math.
- GenAI Applications
Mitul Tiwari
Co-founder & CTO
Stealth
Co-founder & CTO
Stealth
Mitul Tiwari is CTO and Co-founder of a stealth AI startup. Until recently he was a Director of AI and Machine Learning Engineering at ServiceNow leading natural language technologies group. Earlier he was CTO and Co-founder of Passage AI (acquired by Servicenow). His expertise lies in building data-driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems. Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) on web-scale text categorization, and its applications. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as ACL, AAAI, KDD, WWW, RecSys, VLDB, SIGIR, CIKM, and SPAA.
- Data Sci & Algos
Timothy Chan
Head of Data
Statsig
Head of Data
Statsig
Timothy Chan is an experienced data science professional, currently serving as the Head of Data at Statsig. This cutting-edge platform provides product observability and experimentation services to top companies such as Notion, RecRoom, WhatNot, and OfferUp. Before joining Statsig, Timothy spent 5 years as a Data Scientist at Facebook (now Meta), where he was involved in projects across Facebook App and Reality Labs. Before venturing into the tech industry, Timothy worked in biotech, researching treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, and Cancer. He holds a PhD in Chemistry and an MBA in Entrepreneurship.
- Lightning Talks
Brenna Buuck
Developer Evangelist
MinIO
Developer Evangelist
MinIO
Brenna Buuck is the subject matter expert at MinIO for databases and datalakes. A data engineer turned Developer Evangelist, she is passionate about coding, data and learning. She endeavors to inspire and educate other developers about the latest tools and technologies with the goal of helping them build amazing things through code, tutorials, speaking and writing. She has her undergraduate degree from UC San Diego and her graduate degree from San Diego State.
- Workshops
Ofer Mendelevitch
Head of Developer Relations
Vectara
Head of Developer Relations
Vectara
Ofer Mendelevitch leads developer relations at Vectara. He has extensive hands-on experience in machine learning, data science and big data systems across multiple industries, and has focused on developing products using large language models since 2019. Prior to Vectara he built and led data science teams at Syntegra, Helix, Lendup, Hortonworks and Yahoo! Ofer holds a B.Sc. in computer science from Technion and M.Sc. in EE from Tel Aviv university, and is the author of "Practical data science with Hadoop" (Addison Wesley).
- AI & Data Culture
Lindsay Murphy
Director, Head of Data
Hiive
Director, Head of Data
Hiive
Lindsay Murphy is a data leader with 13 years of industry experience. She is currently a Director and Head of Data at Hiive, the marketplace for private stock. Before Hiive, Lindsay led data teams at Secoda, Maple and BenchSci. Lindsay is also a co-organizer of the Toronto Modern Data Stack Meetup, an instructor of Advanced dbt with Uplimit and the creator/host of the Women Lead Data podcast.
- AI & Data Culture
Colleen Tartow
Field CTO & Head of Strategy
VAST Data
Field CTO & Head of Strategy
VAST Data
Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. is Field CTO and Head of Strategy at VAST Data and has 20+ years of experience in data, analytics, engineering, and consulting. Adept at assisting organizations in deriving value from a data-driven culture, she has successfully led diverse data, engineering, and analytics teams through the development of complex global data management solutions and architecting enterprise data systems. Her demonstrated excellence in data, engineering, analytics, and diversity leadership makes her a trusted senior advisor among executives. An experienced speaker, author, valued mentor and startup advisor, Colleen holds degrees in astrophysics and lives in Massachusetts.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Jake Thomas
Manager, Data Foundations
Okta
Manager, Data Foundations
Okta
Jake currently manages the Data Foundations team at Okta after transitioning from Principal Engineer on Okta's Defensive Cyber Operations team. He previously led data platform teams at Shopify and CarGurus, has taught various O'Reilly courses, and regularly contributes to data-oriented OSS projects.
- Lightning Talks
Tobias Lunt
Co-Founder & Data Scientist
Development Data Lab
Co-Founder & Data Scientist
Development Data Lab
Tobias is co-founder and Head of Data at Development Data Lab, where his mission is to deliver insights and open data to fight poverty and improve policy around the world. He leads data engineering, analytical, geospatial, and visualization efforts at DDL. In a past life, he was a Fulbrighter to Ethiopia working on agricultural development alongside rural farmers.
- AI Engineering
Marck Vaisman
Global AI Solutions Architect
Microsoft
Global AI Solutions Architect
Microsoft
Marck is a data science expert with 15 years of experience, currently aiding customers in harnessing Azure for their data workloads. As an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and George Washington University, he integrates industry knowledge into courses like Big Data and Cloud Computing. He's also the founder of Data Community DC, promoting data science in the Washington DC area. An advocate for R programming, Marck has authored several data science publications, including "Analyzing the Analyzers". He holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Elias DeFaria
Co-Founder & VP of Product
SDF
Co-Founder & VP of Product
SDF
Elias DeFaria is the cofounder and VP of Product at SDF Labs, a cutting-edge transformation layer that combines dbt-like capabilities with native SQL understanding and execution. He leads product strategy and development, collaborating closely with customers and engineers to deliver the next generation of data transformation tools.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Sumedh Sakdeo
Senior Staff Software Engineer
LinkedIn
Senior Staff Software Engineer
LinkedIn
Sumedh Sakdeo is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn. He has 15+ years of experience working in data infrastructure. He previously contributed to a log-structured file system at Tintri and led data infrastructure, engineering, and visualization for Lyft's Autonomous Vehicles division. Notably, at LinkedIn, he spearheaded the development of OpenHouse, an open source control plane for Apache Iceberg Tables, enabling efficient table maintenance and data layout optimization at scale.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Jesus Camacho
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
Jesús Camacho Rodríguez is a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, leading a team focused on query optimization and processing for Fabric Data Warehouse. Previously, he led a team in the Gray Systems Lab (GSL), driving innovation in data systems performance, interoperability, and benchmarking across Azure Data's product portfolio. Before Microsoft, he worked at Cloudera on query optimization for SQL data warehouse engines. A member of the Apache Software Foundation, he has made significant contributions to open-source projects like Apache Calcite and Apache Hive, and, more recently, has focused on projects in the table formats space, including LST-Bench and Apache XTable (incubating). He holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Sud and Inria, France.
- Data Sci & Algos
Ciro Greco
Founder
Bauplan
Founder
Bauplan
Ciro Greco is the Founder and CEO of bauplan, a zero-copy, data-first FaaS platform launched in 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, Linguistics and Neuroscience from the University of Milano-Bicocca. Previously, he co-founded Tooso, an AI-powered commerce search company acquired by Coveo in 2019, where he later served as VP of Artificial Intelligence. His expertise spans AI, linguistics, and data engineering, with a focus on making cloud data pipelines more efficient.
- Data Sci & Algos
Joseph Powers
Principal Data Scientist
Intuit
Principal Data Scientist
Intuit
Joseph is a Principal Data Scientist at Intuit, where he has lead Experimentation and Advanced Analytics. He is highly interested in experimentation, designing for large effects, simulation studies, Bayesian modeling, optimal stopping and decision theory. He will be very glad if you approach him to discuss any of these topics during the conference. Previous careers include 7 years as a custom furniture maker and a Psychology PhD from Stanford. When he is not programming or playing dad he enjoys woodworking, cooking and surfing.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Marcel Kornacker
Co-Founder & CTO
Pixeltable
Co-Founder & CTO
Pixeltable
Marcel Kornacker is currently CTO and Co-Founder at Pixeltable and is notably known as the founder of Apache Impala and co-founder of Apache Parquet. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he studied databases under Joe Hellerstein. His career includes founding several startups, including Blink Computing, which provided data lake analytics as a service. He has also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at both Sutter Hill Ventures and Coatue Management. Kornacker's expertise spans databases, data analytics, and open-source technologies.
- Databases
Marco Slot
Software Imagineer
Crunchy Data
Software Imagineer
Crunchy Data
Marco Slot is a Software Imagineer at Crunchy Data, where he's building Crunchy Data Warehouse, a modern PostgreSQL-based solution. He previously served as Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, architecting Citus for Azure Cosmos DB, and was Principal Engineer at Citus Data before its acquisition by Microsoft. Slot holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin and a Master's in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
- Lightning Talks
Anil Sadineni
Principal Software Engineer
1upHealth
Principal Software Engineer
1upHealth
A self-driven technology enthusiast with a deep passion for distributed data systems, Anil Sadineni embodies a continuous learning philosophy and a growth mindset to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of data engineering. He currently leads the architecture, design, and development of the Data Platform at 1upHealth, harnessing a modern data stack to tackle complex challenges in healthcare data interoperability and beyond.
- Lightning Talks
Saif Ur-Rehman
Data Engineering Lead
Basecamp Research
Data Engineering Lead
Basecamp Research
Dr. Saif Ur-Rehman is Principal Data Engineer at Basecamp Research, where he leads a team developing strategic data pipelines and bioinformatics systems that have facilitated the production of state-of-the-art models for protein folding, annotation, and generation. His work focuses on constructing datasets for model training and fine-tuning while leveraging computational biology to build sustainable solutions. His expertise spans cancer biology and machine learning, developed through his postdoctoral work at the Institute of Cancer Research and his bioinformatics experience at EMBL-EBI and Genomics England after earning his PhD in Computational Biology from the University of St Andrews.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Jonathan Jin
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Hinge
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Hinge
Jonathan Jin is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Hinge where, as a member of the AI Platform Core team, he helps democratize the cost-efficient, robust, and scalable use of AI within the company. He has previously worked on production-scale ML platform and infrastructure at Spotify, NVIDIA, and Twitter. Prior to diving down the ML rabbit-hole, he worked on observability and SRE infrastructure at Uber. When he's not debugging inference pipelines, he enjoys cooking, literature, and plot-heavy JRPGs.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Madison Faulkner
Principal & Head of Data Science
NEA
Principal & Head of Data Science
NEA
Madison is an investor at NEA focused on early-stage data, infrastructure, developer tools, data science, and AI/ML. She also leads the data and AI platform internally to leverage data & AI for investment and firm decision-making. Previously, she invested at Costanoa Ventures where she worked closely with Delphina.ai, Probabl.ai, Mindtrip.ai, Noteable.io (acq by Confluent), Rafay.co, and others. Prior to investing, Madison was Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at Thrasio, Head of Data Science at Greycroft, and held several data science positions at Facebook working on embeddings, knowledge graphs and deep learning infrastructure with FAIR. Madison received a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford and grew up in Colorado performing in rodeos.
- Data Sci & Algos
Wenjing Zheng
Data Science Manager
Roblox
Data Science Manager
Roblox
Wenjing Zheng, Data Science Manager at Roblox, leads the Ecosystem and Learning Platforms team. With dual PhDs from UC Berkeley and Université Paris Cité, she brings over a decade of experience in causal machine learning. Previously at Netflix, she led experimentation and ads growth initiatives. Her expertise spans causal inference, ML, and data science.
- Analytics & BI
Hamilton Ulmer
UI Engineer & Designer
MotherDuck
UI Engineer & Designer
MotherDuck
Hamilton Ulmer is currently a designer and software engineer at MotherDuck. Previously he was head of application engineering at Rill Data, where he built conversation-fast dashboard tools with DuckDB, and spent several years at Mozilla working on projects including Iodide, the WebAssembly-powered notebook environment that gave rise to Pyodide, the popular WebAssembly port of CPython. Hamilton's work pushes the boundaries of databases and web browsers to make data analysis feel more natural and engaging.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Vignesh Chadramohan
Engineering Manager
Doordash
Engineering Manager
Doordash
Vignesh Chandramohan leads data engineering at DoorDash, architecting real-time analytics and data lake solutions. A Microsoft veteran with 17+ years of experience, he was instrumental in developing Azure Stream Analytics and Microsoft Fabric's stream processing capabilities. Currently focused on building scalable data infrastructure using technologies like Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Flink. Also maintains SlateDB, an open-source embedded database built for object storage.
- AI & Data Culture
Doron Porat
Co-Founder & CEO
Lakeway
Co-Founder & CEO
Lakeway
Doron is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lakeway, enabling modern data platforms to scale efficiently and drive greater business impact through operational excellence. With over a decade of experience leading data and platform engineering teams, Doron is a recognized public speaker and podcaster, deeply engaged with the global data community. She brings a unique perspective on fostering collaboration and innovation at the intersection of infrastructure, people, and processes. When she needs to reset, you’ll likely find her fiddling with weeds in her garden or online shopping for home accessories.
- AI & Data Culture
Eevamaija Virtanen
Founder & Senior Data Engineer
Invinite & Helsinki Data Week
Founder & Senior Data Engineer
Invinite & Helsinki Data Week
Eevamaija Virtanen is Co-Founder of Invinite, building scalable data solutions for healthcare. A respected data engineering leader known for her human-centered approach to building data products. Founded Helsinki Data Week and DataTribe to foster tech community growth in Finland. Board Member of TIVIA shaping Finland's ICT landscape. Advocates for pragmatic, business-focused data solutions.
- Workshops
Dr. Greg Michaelson
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Zerve AI
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Zerve AI
Dr. Greg Michaelson is Co-Founder of Zerve AI, building next-generation tools for data science and LLMs. Previously Chief Customer Officer at DataRobot, where he helped pioneer automated machine learning. An Applied Statistics Ph.D. who led analytics at Travelers and served as VP of Quantitative Risk Analysis at Regions Bank. Known for bridging technical and business worlds while scaling AI solutions.
- AI Engineering
Rachel Lee Nabors
Developer Experience Lead
AgentQL
Developer Experience Lead
AgentQL
Rachel Lee Nabors is a developer experience leader known for launching award-winning developer portals, notably with Meta's React team. They have shaped technical documentation at Mozilla (MDN) and W3C, while building developer education teams across FAANG and startups. Their career spans roles at AWS Amplify, Meta, and Booking.com. Currently a Fractional Developer Experience Leader in London, Rachel helps companies create effective developer advocacy and documentation programs.
- AI Engineering
Tengyu Ma
Co-Founder & CEO
Voyage AI
Co-Founder & CEO
Voyage AI
Tengyu Ma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Voyage AI and also an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and B.E. from Tsinghua University. His research interests include topics in machine learning, algorithms and their theory, such as deep learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, pre-training / foundation models, robustness, non-convex optimization, distributed optimization, and high-dimensional statistics.. He is a recipient of ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the Sloan Fellowship, and the NSF CAREER Award.
- AI Engineering
Eno Reyes
CTO
Factory
CTO
Factory
Eno Reyes is co-founder and CTO of Factory, an organization building an AI platform for accelerating the entire software development lifecycle. He was previously an ML engineer at Hugging Face, where he worked on enterprise LLM deployment, fine-tuning, and productionization. He was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in AI.
- ML OPs & Platforms
Nikita Vemuri
Software Engineer
Anyscale
Software Engineer
Anyscale
Nikita Vemuri is a software engineer at Anyscale, where she focuses on developing observability features across Ray and the Anyscale platform to help developers debug and monitor their large scale AI workloads. She joined Anyscale as one of the early engineers and has contributed to multiple initiatives across the platform stack over the last 4 years. As a UC Berkeley grad, she earned both her bachelor's and master's in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and conducted research at Berkeley’s RISE Lab.
- GenAI Applications
Lin Qiao
Co-Founder & CEO
Fireworks AI
Co-Founder & CEO
Fireworks AI
Lin Qiao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fireworks AI, an AI production and inference platform helping enterprises customize, deploy and run state-of-the-art generative AI models and build compound AI systems. Prior to Fireworks, Lin led a team of over 300 engineers as head of Meta's PyTorch. She began her engineering career at IBM in 2003, followed by a stint as a tech lead at LinkedIn, where she built the company's data life cycle management platform. Lin holds a PhD in computer science from UC Santa Barbara.
- GenAI Applications
Ethan Brown
Director, Data & Applied Science
Twitch / AWS
Director, Data & Applied Science
Twitch / AWS
Ethan leads data and applied science at Amazon IVS, the video service that powers Twitch, and has held similar roles for the better part of a decade. He is a practicing-turned-armchair physicist, having spent the first half of his career developing algorithms to simulate quantum mechanics on super computers.
- Analytics & BI
Ganesh Ramanarayanan
VP Engineering
Hex
VP Engineering
Hex
Ganesh Ramanarayanan is VP of Engineering at Hex, where he leads the team building the future of data analytics. Previously, he led platform engineering at Notion and spent eight years scaling Pure Storage from startup to public company, growing engineering from 40 to 600+ people. A builder of high-performing teams, he holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.
- Lightning Talks
John Bagnall
Senior Data Product Manager
Matillion
Senior Data Product Manager
Matillion
John Bagnall is the Senior Product Manager at Matillion where he leads the development of data governance and quality solutions. Previously, he served as Product Owner at NEC Software Solutions and held roles as a Software Developer at Mainline and Data Analyst at Secret Spot. With over a decade of hands-on experience, John specializes in making complex data systems more intuitive and user-friendly, ensuring technical solutions align with real business needs.
- Lightning Talks
CL Kao
Founder
Recce
Founder
Recce
CL Kao is the CEO and founder of Recce, bringing CI/CD and change validations to data-centric systems. Prior to Recce, he developed GPU-cluster management tools that empowered the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer to efficiently run their data science and AI workloads. Earlier in his career, he created a precursor to Git, aiding companies like Apple in managing large-scale codebases. He also co-founded g0v (gov-zero), a civic tech community dedicated to tackling social and democratic challenges through open data and open source collaboration.
- Lightning Talks
Avi Press
CEO
Scarf
CEO
Scarf
Avi Press is the founder and CEO of Scarf, where he promotes open source sustainability through responsible usage analytics practices. A UC Berkeley graduate, he's become a leading voice in making open source analytics more mainstream and data-driven. Prior to founding Scarf in 2019, he worked as a software engineer at companies like Pandora and Backbone. Avi is also a board member of the Haskell Foundation, and a host on the Hacking Open Source Business Podcast.
- Lightning Talks
Michael Cohen
Global Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Plus Company
Global Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Plus Company
Michael is a globally recognized leader in AI and data-driven business transformation, known for developing AIOS, an intelligent marketing system at Plus that optimizes customer journey analysis and marketing ROI. A former NYU Stern marketing professor, his research spans predictive computation, marketing strategies, and consumer behavior. He has launched successful AI products focused on user safety, privacy, and marketing optimization. His work on explainable prediction and data synthesis, particularly with incomplete data, has been featured in major publications like LA Times and AdAge, and he frequently speaks at prestigious events including The Nantucket Project and ANA Masters of Marketing.
- Workshops
Dylan Perez Neider
Sr. Solutions Engineer
Sigma Computing
Sr. Solutions Engineer
Sigma Computing
Dylan Perez Neider is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sigma Computing. Over his three years at Sigma, he has guided hundreds of customers in building innovative business solutions that go beyond the limitations of legacy BI tools. Passionate about empowering employees of all technical and non-technical backgrounds, Perez Neider champions data-driven decision making and self-sufficiency: core principles of Sigma's mission.
- Data Eng & Infrastructure
Anant Agarwal
Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Lead
Instacart
Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Lead
Instacart
Anant Agarwal is a Staff Software Engineer and Technical Lead in Instacart's Data Infrastructure group, leading initiatives for developer and data productivity at scale. During his 4+ years at Instacart, he has developed mission-critical distributed platforms and orchestration systems that power the company's data pipelines, workflow engines, and services ecosystem, processing millions of workflows daily. Previously at VMware, as Staff Software Engineer and one of the early engineers on VMware Cloud on AWS, he built high availability and distributed resource scheduling systems for hybrid cloud environments.
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Showcase Your Startup @ AI Launchpad 2025
Zero Prime Ventures, the team behind Data Council, is proud to announce our 2nd annual AI Launchpad where 6 exceptional AI startups will be chosen to showcase.
This isn't just another pitch competition. Instead, we're hand-selecting and recognizing AI's most promising early-stage startups.
About Our Tracks
Our carefully curated tracks balance proven technical foundations with emerging data & AI trends. Get real frameworks, techniques and actionable knowledge straight from seasoned practitioners.
Data Eng & Infrastructure
AI Engineering
Data Science & Algos
GenAI Applications
Analytics & BI
MLOps & Platforms
Foundation Models
Databases
AI & Data Culture
Lightning Talks
Meet the Hosts
Content quality sets Data Council apart. Unlike other conferences that simply accept abstracts as-is, our track hosts go the extra mile to hand select presentations and collaborate with speakers on their topics to ensure the highest value talks take the stage.
Carlos Aguilar
Founder
Hashboard
Daniel Francisco
Director of Product
Meta
Maggie Hays
Community Product Manager
Acryl Data
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Roger Magoulas
Principal
Almost Data
Sai Srirampur
Principal Engineer
Clickhouse
Scott Breitenother
Founder & CEO
Brooklyn Data
Sean Anderson
Head of Product Marketing
Vectara
Sean Taylor
Data Scientist
OpenAI
Swyx (Shawn) Wang
Co-Host
Latent.Space Podcast
Tristan Zajonc
CEO & Co-Founder
Continual
Meet the Team
Pete Soderling
Founder Data Council & Zero Prime Ventures
Yang Tran
Partner at Zero Prime Ventures
Tim Wu
Head of Marketing at Data Council
Missy Bass
Events Director at Data Council
Gillian Jarvis
Design Advisor at Data Council
Oakland Scottish Rite Center
Welcome to the Temple of Data =}
April 22nd - 24th, 2025
Oakland | Lake Merritt
See You in Oakland!
This year, we're excited to call the historic Oakland Scottish Rite Center home to Data Council 2025.
Nestled on Lake Merritt with stunning lake views, this architectural gem puts you steps from downtown's best hotels, dining, and nightlife. Just 15 minutes from BART or a scenic ferry ride from downtown San Francisco.
547 Lakeside Dr, Oakland, CA, 94612
Thanks to Our Sponsors
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MARK YOUR CALENDARS! 3 DAYS, APR 22-24
Why Attend Data Council?
Learn from Industry Experts
Get architectural insights and best practices straight from the pioneers building the future of data & AI, no marketing fluff here.
Hands-On Experiences
Put theory into practice through interactive workshops and learning opportunities, such as our unique office hours where you can meet any speaker in a small group setting.
Unparalleled Networking
Get exclusive access and connect with engineers and founders who speak your language. No suits and sales pitches, just real pros sharing their work.