Program Committee

Sarthak is a software engineer at AWS. He has been contributing open-source projects like Valkey and OpenSearch. He is passionate about large-scale distributed databases and gets excited about associated aspects of performance.

Nigel is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Austin, Texas. He was drawn to the craft of software engineering because of the agency it provides people to build and interact with worlds of their own creation. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies and his passions in technology are community building, High Performance Computing, and free and open source software (and hardware).

Tirtha specializes in distributed data systems and has extensive experience building and managing very large-scale streaming infrastructure. He is currently a tech lead on the Valkey team at Apple. Before working at Apple, he was a Staff Engineer on the pub-sub and streaming team at Linkedin, where he worked on Apache Kafka and helped build Northguard – Linkedin’s next-generation streaming backbone. Before that, he was a founding engineer on the Managed Streaming for Kafka team at AWS.

Laura Czajkowski is a senior open source and community leader with 20 years of experience building and scaling developer communities around infrastructure and databases. She has held leadership roles at Canonical, MongoDB, and Percona, working at the intersection of community, engineering, and organizational strategy. Through her writing at laura.community, Laura focuses on sustainable community design, maintainer health, leadership without authority, and the human systems behind successful open source projects.

Joe is a technical lead at Braze, where he heads the In-Memory Databases and Observability teams and runs Valkey at scale on Kubernetes. He is also a maintainer of the open source Valkey Operator project.

Product Manager in the In-Memory Databases team at AWS focused on Valkey, the open-source high-performance datastore engine for Amazon ElastiCache. Outside of work Mas follows the wind and the ocean while freediving, paragliding, kitesurfing, and sailing.

Roberto Luna Rojas is a Sr Developer Advocate for Valkey based in the USA, originally from Mexico. He tries to get the most out of in-memory databases one bit at the time. When not in front of the computer, he loves spending time with his family, listening to music, and watching movies, TV shows, and sports.

Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance key-value datastore, and Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on building secure and highly reliable features, with a passion in working with open-source communities.

Sandeep Palur is an engineering leader at Apple, responsible for the engineering of Apple’s in-memory database and caching infrastructure supporting mission-critical services. His expertise includes large-scale distributed systems and in-memory databases. Sandeep has served as a Program Committee member and reviewer for leading journals and conferences, and has authored publications in distributed systems and cloud computing.

Docker Captain. DevOps Institute Ambassador. CD.Foundation Ambassador.
Engineer, leader, mentor, speaker.

I was wearing many hats. Now I am enjoying being Developer Advocate and commit to communities. My main focus these days is digital sovereignty.

I am involved in several community initiatives, like mentoring, conferences, meetups.

I am co-author of CI/CD Design Patterns book.

Host of OhMyCloud! Youtube channel.

The most important thing in building great software is not how to do it but what the customer need is and why such need exists.

Allen is passionate about distributed, performant systems. When not travelling the world for pleasure or playing duplicate bridge, Allen can be found in San Jose, California.

Abe Taha is the Engineering Director for Google Cloud Memorystore, where he oversees the development and strategy for Valkey, Redis, Redis Cluster, and Memcached services. Abe brings an extensive expertise in Machine Learning, distributed systems, and cloud computing to the cloud infrastructure landscape. Prior to joining Google, he held a series of strategic leadership roles at global technology leaders including Microsoft, Oracle, and Yahoo, as well as various high-growth startups within the data and analytics sector. Outside of his professional endeavors, Abe enjoys traveling with his wife and two children.

Manvika Tuteja is an Open Source TPM at AWS working at the intersection of AI, open source, and developer communities. She brings maintainers, contributors, and organizations together to turn emerging technologies into practical, sustainable impact. Her work focuses on Valkey, responsible AI adoption, contributor experience, and creating stronger ecosystems around developers.