Qubole Qatalysts

Josh is a data engineer at Expedia Group/HomeAway in Austin, Texas. He enjoys designing and implementing simple solutions to complex problems through creativity, innovation and by bridging the gap between the technical and non-technical. Josh moved to Austin about five years ago with his wife and two kids after he created a spreadsheet analyzing 20 US cities (yeah, he knows,… his poor wife). His family keeps him quite busy, so when not working, he’s usually watching his kids at gymnastics or soccer practice.

Yaroslav Tkachenko is a software architect at Activision Blizzard working on a big data platform for Call of Duty games. He is a self-described software engineer interested in distributed systems, microservices, functional programming, modern cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices. Prior to joining Activision, Yaroslav held various leadership roles in multiple startups. He was responsible for designing, developing, delivering and maintaining platform services and cloud infrastructure for mission critical systems. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.

Sean Downes is a senior data scientist at Expedia. As a data scientist, he has focused on auction and game design, machine learning and other odds and ends in distributed computing. As a theoretical physicist, Sean’s studies ran between blood oxidation models to topologically extend supergravity to applied singularity theory in early universe cosmology. Sean spends a lot of time with ranking problems and contextual bandits, and using graph theory to provide unsupervised clustering models for activities. He is platform agnostic, using Spark a lot lately. He is particular about using Java, Scala or Python based on context. He lives in Seattle.

Russell Lego is a software engineer at Adobe Ad Cloud where he builds and orchestrates building and orchestrating data pipelines with Qubole. Russell was born in the Santa Cruz mountains and always loved outdoor adventures while enjoying the stars. This led him to a degree in Physics from San Francisco State University and soon after joined the Ad Tech space. Probing the heavenly mysteries are a never-ending passion. He lives in the Bay Area.

John Riewerts is a senior director of Engineering at Acxiom. His teams focus on unified data layer: an omni channel platform that enables analytics, audience management, and real time engagement fueled by clients disparate data sources off of the brand’s identity graph in a privacy compliant manner. Simply put, he and his team, make activating industry and channel based data sources easy. John has worked in the adtech, martech and pharmaceutical industries. Outside of work, he stays busy with his wife and two daughters at home in Austin, Texas.

Mike Rancourt is a senior product manager with more than ten years of management, ad operations and product background. He has an entrepreneurial spirit with experience expanding office locations in new markets. Prior to MediaMath, Mike worked at Visual IQ and Digilant. His Twitter page backs his interests in basketball, Bryant University basketball, music and adtech — right behind his wife and two young sons. He lives in the greater Boston area.

Steve Gotlieb is a big data architect at Autodesk, where his responsibilities include designing systems, processes and procedures to enable self-service ETL, machine learning, reporting and ad hoc query capabilities against the Autodesk enterprise data lake. Steve joined Autodesk in 2002. He is one of the primary contributors to the big data platform at Autodesk. This data supports ost departments from product marketing to customer operations. His home is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Satish is a big data solutions architect who loves working on Dev/Data Ops automation. He provides holistic, highly performant/scalable and modern big data solutions using spark, HBase and other tools in the Hadoop ecosystem. Satish’s experience includes working with several Fortune 100 customers and technology focused startups. He lives in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Justin Wainwright is a DevOps engineer at Oracle. He is a pioneer of big data and enjoys sharing and networking with the big data community. Previously he worked at Datalogix, which was acquired by Oracle Data Cloud. Justin has worked with hundreds of analysts and developers over time, encouraging an empowered culture that consistently revisits new standards for doing things. He lives in the greater Denver area.

Blake Reed is the director of engineering at Acxiom, currently leading a team of engineers building their Unified Data Layer offering using the latest technology. He has over 18 years of technical development and management experience at Acxiom. Blake’s passion is technology, learning and leading high performance teams. His previous experience includes building and delivering enterprise database solutions for several Fortune 500 companies — as well as across media, telco, T&E, retail and Insurance. Blake lives in Conway, Arkansas.