Paul CurtisPaul is a principal solutions architect at Weaveworks, where he provides pre- and post-sales technical expertise. Paul comes from the big data world and machine learning world, having spent seven years at MapR. Paul has served as senior operations engineer for Unami, a startup founded to deliver on the promise of interactive TV for consumers, and was systems manager for Spiral Universe, a company providing school administration software as a service. He has also held senior support engineer positions at Sun Microsystems, as well as enterprise account technical management positions for both Netscape and FileNet. Earlier in his career, Paul worked in financial application development for Applix, IBM Service Bureau and Ticketron.

Katie GamanjiCurrently a Cloud Platform Engineer at American Express. Former cloud platforms engineer at Condé Nast, that contributed to the creation of a centralized, globally distributed platform, with Kubernetes as its centerpiece. In the past worked on maintaining and automating site delivery on OpenStack based infrastructure, which transitioned into a role that focuses on designing, deploying and evolving cloud-native infrastructure. A strong advocate for women in STEM, and public speaker on topics that gravitate towards cloud-native tools and Kubernetes ecosystem.

Marco PalladinoMarco Palladino is an inventor, software developer and Internet entrepreneur based in San Francisco. As the CTO and co-founder of Kong, he is Kong’s co-author, responsible for the design and delivery of the company’s products, while also providing technical thought leadership around APIs and microservices within both Kong and the external software community. Prior to Kong, Marco co-founded Mashape in 2010, which became the largest API marketplace and was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017.

Melissa van der HechtMelissa van der Hecht works at Kong helping business leaders to define and realize relevant benefits from the technology. Her passion is to help teams create a technology and architecture vision for the future and evangelize that vision across the organization. Melissa knows the API and microservices space well, having also spent five years at MuleSoft in the Office of the CTO and Solution Consulting teams, and has helped several multi-national organizations create and implement their API strategy. She holds a B.Sc and M.Eng in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bristol University in the UK.

Austin ParkerAustin is an international speaker, having presented to audiences in Europe and North America on topics relating to observability and DevOps. In addition, he has led or assisted with workshops on OSS projects such as OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing at events including QCon SF 2019, QCon London 2020, and O’Reilly Infrastructure and Ops 2020. Finally, he has extensive experience speaking to diverse audiences in a variety of media formats through his podcast “On-Call Me Maybe” and his event live streams such as “OPS Live!”

Reza ShafiiReza Shafii is a seasoned product executive in the infrastructure and middleware space. His early career was as a software engineer at Nortel Networks as well as a technical consultant at BEA Systems. During this time, Reza fell in love with Product Management and has since led Product at a number of successful enterprises, including the first Product Management hire at MuleSoft, VP of product at CoreOS, and through acquisition, GM and VP of platform services for OpenShift at Red Hat. In his spare time, Reza still gravitates to writing code for fun and clears his head by taking on the beautiful bike roads of the Bay area.