2019 Speakers

Devesh is a results driven leader with a passion & expertise in Technology Architecture, Innovation Strategy, Identity Management and Security with a proven track record of delivering high quality “Next Generation” products for various Fortune 100 companies. He has over 15 years of IT experience in the areas of architecture & implementation of Scalable, High Volume, Highly Available Distributed Enterprise IT applications hosted both ‘On-Prem’ & on ‘Public/Hybrid clouds’ with a focus on Performance, Security, Reliability and Technical Excellence. Devesh holds numerous technical certifications and is a frequent speaker at technical conferences. Prior to joining Merlin, Devesh held technology leadership positions at Charter Communications & Time Warner Cable and has also worked for American Express.

Abhinav Asthana is an experienced developer and entrepreneur. He wrote the first free Postman app in 2012 when he first began working with APIs because he realized that *hated* cURL. He envisioned a simple client for HTTP requests to help him get beyond simple GET and POST requests and into the complexity of real-world API development. Postman is now used by 6 million developers across more than 200,000 companies worldwide. He holds a B.E. (with honors) from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Anil is a Software Engineer at Intuit working on some of the key challenges to move Intuit's microservices onto Service Mesh. His other areas of work at Intuit include distributed and scalable rate limiting algorithm, orchestration layer in API Gateway for Graphql and designing OSGi architecture for enabling plug and play features on API Gateway. Prior to this, Anil worked at Qualcomm where he played a key role in developing the 2net health care platform. Anil's interests include L4/L7 routing and Distributed systems. While not at work, Anil loves to do gardening.

Polerio Babao is a Sr. Technology Architect in US Bank's Enterprise IT Team. His culmination of different technology capabilities were achieved from his experience on Government, Logistics, Publishing, Retail and Finance industries. He is known by most of his colleagues as an Architect or SME on Microservices, APIs, Cloud and DevOps. He is very passionate about Security & Information Assurance and recently earned his Master’s in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance and also couple of certifications in security space.

Sumanto Biswas has been with IBM API Connect from the formation of the product. Previously, he worked on Cast Iron, which was in the application integration business. IBM bought Cast Iron, and that formed the foundations for IBM API Connect. He previously also worked on Vitria BusinessWare, another application integration platform. He is passionate about technology, and always thinking about the next challenge.

Keith Casey currently serves on the Platform Team at Okta working on Identity and Authentication APIs. Previously, he served as an early Developer Evangelist at Twilio and before that worked on the Ultimate Geek Question at the Library of Congress. His underlying goal is to get good technology into the hands of good people to do great things. In his spare time, he helps build and support the Austin tech community, blogs at CaseySoftware.com and is fascinated by monkeys. He is also a co-author of “A Practical Approach to API Design” from Leanpub.

Aidan Cunniffe has been on a mission to automate all the routine parts of programming so developers can focus on the work that matters most to them. He's the founder of the open source project and YCombinator alum Optic (useoptic.com) and the mobile app development tool Dropsource (dropsource.com). When he's not writing code, or figuring out ways of writing less code, you can find him on a long run or telling jokes at the comedy club.

Chase is the Director of Product and Alliances Marketing at Cloud Elements and leads the customer GTM team that creates and implements white-labeled marketing tactics to help customers grow. He also struggles to explain what he does to his parents.

Wesley has over 25 years in the software industry and is a 15-year veteran of the identity and security space. Wesley is currently Field CTO for Ping Identity. In his role Wesley helps customers understand both the business value and implications of new technologies, and helps Ping maintain its thought leadership position via blogs, whitepapers, conference presentations, and standards body work. Wesley was previously director of engineering for CA Technologies SiteMinder products and was chief architect for CA’s first IDaaS offering. More recently Wesley was lead platform architect for Sophos’ cloud cybersecurity offerings.

Anjana is a Director at WSO2 Inc., currently working on Ecosystem Engineering for Ballerina. He has been a core developer of the Ballerina VM earlier, and continues to contribute to its features. He also has experience in data integration, analytics and enterprise integration.

Gaurav runs the Services Infrastructure group at Box. This group focuses on building service frameworks, infrastructure components and critical developer tools that power the microservices eco-system at Box (Vertx, Netty, Docker, Kubernetes). Gaurav enjoys architectural challenges and building scalable systems. He approaches architectural transformation with a consumer back perspective focusing on the business outcome and developer experience.

Derric is the Co-Founder and CEO of Moesif. Previously, he was the Co-Founder and CTO of Trove, a safe and reliable online marketplace for secondhand goods. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Derric built award-winning debug and verification software for Intel and later was a computer architect on Intel’s Xeon Phi, a CPU for High Performance Computing and Machine Learning workloads.

Iddo Gino is the Founder and CEO of RapidAPI. Part of Forbes 30 Under 30 list, he's a 2017 Thiel Fellow. Previously, he was a Co-organizer of Hacking Gen Y. Iddo has been programming since he was a kid and continues to contribute to open-source projects. Originally from Haifa, Israel, Iddo is based in San Francisco, CA.

Alan Glickenhouse is the IBM API Business Strategist. Alan assists clients with their business and IT strategy for Digital Transformation and the API Economy. Starting with an understanding of the client’s business direction, IT strategy, and existing environment (both business and technical), Alan helps businesses successfully adopt a Digital Transformation and API strategy that fits their environment. He meets clients in all industries, all geographies, and of all sizes and brings knowledge of best practices shared with and by these businesses. Alan is the author of over 100 papers, articles and videos. He can communicate at both the business and IT level and explain both why and how a business will benefit from IBM solutions.

Tanmai Gopal is the CEO, co-founder of Hasura. He is a StackOverflow powered fullstack developer whose areas of interest and work span react, GraphQL, nodejs, haskell, docker, postgres & kubernetes. He is passionate about making it easy to build complex things and is the instructor of India's largest MOOC imad.tech with over 250,000 students.

Ben is an architect on Comcast's Advanced Applications Engineering team. A REST API proponent for many years, he has spoken on hypermedia at Velocity, API Strat, and other conferences. At Comcast, he designs APIs and solutions that power the Xfinity Stream application on mobile, web, Roku and Smart TVs. Ben resides in Philadelphia with his wife, and too many cats.

Gautam is a technology leader with 16 years of experience in building and delivering technology solutions in data engineering, AI/ML modeling and cloud. He has worked in multiple geographies across Europe, Asia and USA. He is a seasoned professional in Fintech and Telcom billing domains with experience of companies like- Lending Club, Amdocs and Oracle.

Rajiv

Steve is a Senior Principal Engineer at Twilio SendGrid. He works on the front-end architecture for products across the organization. He also also the author of Electron, has taught workshops with Frontend Masters, and started the front-end engineer program at the Turing School of Software and Design.

Dr. Shiva Kintali is the Founder & CEO of TrueCerts, an Enterprise grade Blockchain powered Data Integrity Platform. Before starting TrueCerts, he taught in the Computer Science department of Princeton University for four years. He is a frequent public speaker on AI, Blockchain, Cryptography and Game theory and their socio-economic and cultural impact. His (academic and industry, theoretical and practical) experience spans algorithm design, complexity theory, cryptography, machine learning, algorithmic game theory, structural graph theory, natural language processing, information retrieval, high-performance computing, compiler design and large-scale graph algorithms. He is doing Blockchain research (algorithms, scalability, stability, privacy, consensus, game theory) since 2012.He received his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, Masters in Computer Science from University of Southern California and B-Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Alissa Knight is a 20-year veteran in cybersecurity as a penetration tester and vulnerability researcher. More recently, she spent several years in Europe performing penetration testing of connected vehicles and is a published author having recently published a new book on hacking connected cars. She is also a serial entrepreneur having sold two previous startups in cybersecurity in successful M&A transactions and recently reinvented herself as a full-time writer in her recovery as a former hacker.

Francois is a member of the Ping Identity Office of the CTO. He provides product and strategic direction to customers and partners with a focus on API infrastructures security and API cybersecurity. Prior to joining Ping, Francois was the first developer and Chief Architect at start-up Layer 7 Technologies until its acquisition by CA Technologies. Francois was part of a team that developed a best of breed security gateway technology which disrupted a category. Francois helped define the application of emerging security patterns such as OAuth in the context of API Management and led a field practice of Architects helping customer with their digital modernization projects.

Adam Leventhal is the co-founder and CEO of Transposit. Prior to founding Transposit in 2016, Adam was the CTO at Delphix where he scaled the engineering team from 10 to over 100. As a member of the Solaris Kernel Development at Sun Microsystems, Adam was one of the three authors of DTrace for which he had received Sun's Chairman's Award for technical excellence in 2004, was named one of InfoWorld's Innovators of 2005, and won top honors from the 2006 Wall Street Journal's Innovation Awards. Also at Sun, Adam was a founding member of the Fishworks team that build the ZFS Storage Appliance. His focus was on innovative uses of flash memory, novel at the time in large scale enterprise storage systems. Adam joined Sun after graduating cum laude from Brown University in 2001 with a degree in Math and Computer Science.

Muktesh is currently working as a Principal Software Engineer for Capital One’s Developer Platform and Emerging Technologies group. He is an open source contributor to 20+ projects and enjoys programming in polyglot. Primarily he is more interested and contributes in Microservices, Cloud, Containerization, Architectures and distributed systems, however lately his focus shifted on a lot of automation and machine learning as well. In his free time he likes photography, solving coding challenges, learning from online resources and cooking. He is a conference junkie (attended multiple conferences) and spoken in various conferences as well(Java One, GDG Conf, InMemory Summit, API Strategy Conference, Docker Con to name a few). He is heavily involved in development and teaching people in various communities (Apache Groups, OpenSource Forums, Docker Mentoring and Java User groups). He has started Sunnyvale Java User group and NorCal Java User group. In his own words,” I am a distinguished engineer, with :::willingness to learn and curious to know::: attitude. I can code, cook, cheer and care. In short, “nothing special but passionately curious” is my jam”.

Helal Nouri is a Product Owner API's at Visma | Raet. Helal works on the domain of HR & Payroll and takes ownership of developing and overseeing internal and public API's within the company. Prior to this role, Helal held posts as an API Software Designer, Automation Engineer and Strategy- and Application Consultant at several companies. Helal has a Bachelor of Science in Business Economics from Utrecht University and a Masters degree in Social Sciences from the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona.

Mofizur Rahman (@moficodes) is a Developer Advocate at IBM. His area of interests include container orchestration and micro services. His favorite programming language these days is Go. He also tinkers with Node, Python and Java. He is also learning and teaching in the Go, Kubernetes, Docker and Microservice community. He is a strong believer of the power open source and importance of giving back to the community. He is a self proclaimed sticker collecting addict and has collected several box full of stickers with no signs of stopping. He dabbles in photography sometimes. He writes tech blogs at NYCDEV medium page which can be found on https://medium.com/@moficodes .

Darren Shelcusky is a 36 year veteran in the automotive industry, where he has led software based initiatives in manufacturing, product development, testing labs, in-vehicle, and connected vehicles. He is a Manager in the Ford Mobility Platform Enablement team, and is responsible for driving the adoption and measurable results around APIs and platforms, as well as applying industry best practices to foster scalable, agile, API-led development. Darren earned a B.S. in Systems Engineering at General Motors Institute and an MBA from Penn State University. He has 12 patents for various connected vehicle and telematics innovations globally.

Clayton Simmons has 10+ years in Enterprise Services Business. Clayton ran Cognizant's Digital Assurance Practice in 2012 and lead an organization focused solely on testing digital assets, both Mobile and IoT. He successfully rolled out Customer Experience (CX) Test offering which revolutionized the approach to the perceived quality quotient versus traditional functional validation of so many other testing services during that time. In 2016, Clayton moved over to Cognizant's Digital Works business unit and was asked to build the partner portfolio for Cognizant's Cloud Native offering adding companies like AWS, Pivotal, and Adobe to it's portfolio of tier one partners. In 2017, Clayton left Cognizant to create and grow the North American regional business of Experitest, an Israeli software automation company. Today, Clayton has his on own practice called the KD McAlly Group, which provides advisory and consulting to Digital and QA executives in large enterprise organizations. Clayton holds Bachelor of Science Graduate of Information Systems at the University of Texas in Arlington and also is an honors graduate of the University of Texas—San Antonio executive MBA program.

As VP, Product Management for Vonage, Bryan Stokes focuses on delivering synergistic products combining the Company’s UCaaS and CPaaS technology. Bryan joined Vonage in 2009, serving in several leadership roles during his time with the Company. Most notable achievements during his tenure include building a project management group in customer care, leading the digital customer self-service team, and launching several of Vonage’s consumer-facing products. Prior to joining Vonage, Bryan held several technology-related roles at ad agencies, large and small, including Google subsidiary DoubleClick, as well as start-up companies in the corporate legal and political fundraising arenas. Bryan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University.

Todd Teta, Chief Product & Technology Officer, ATTOM Data SolutionsTodd Teta serves as ATTOM Data Solutions' Chief Product & Technology Officer where he leverages two decades of experience in technology and product innovation to lead ATTOM's technology and product teams. Prior to joining ATTOM Data Solutions, Todd led the product development and technology organization at Meyers Research. Todd began his career with Andersen Consulting, where he helped clients leverage data and technology to drive business results. Subsequently, he co-founded several startups, including VisionCore, a product and service company serving the mortgage and real estate data and analytics markets. He eventually sold VisionCore to CoreLogic, the largest provider of residential real-estate information services. At CoreLogic, Todd led research and development teams that developed the company’s first mobile and mapping visualization products. He also led the company’s professional services organization and technology teams for multiple markets, including credit reporting and tenant screening. Todd graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern California with a degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science.Udi Dorner, Chief Operating Officer, SetSchedule Udi Dorner is co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of SetSchedule, the technology innovator that is revolutionizing real-estate business development by drawing on its multi-patented matching engine that leverages AI-powered predictive data, insider market insights and automated marketing software tools. He is an established entrepreneur with expertise in the technology field and has more than 15 years of experience in strategically managing businesses. He is a key player in the area of developing innovative business solutions and managing collaboration with clients and partners. Prior to co-founding SetSchedule, Udi was the Co-Founder and Vice President of Operations at Fidelis Diagnostics, a national medical diagnostic services company with a network of more than 1,700 physicians. He was also a member of the founding team at Hearing Fusion where he served as the Chief Operating Officer. Udi is a graduate of the Israeli Defense Force Business Development Technology division.

Rajeev Venkitaraman has been part of the technological journey for the last 18 years. From hands on development to simplification do complex architectures and business processes, Rajeev has gained expertise across different technologies and platforms with a focus on manufacturing and automotive industries. In his present role of Chief Digital Architect at Michelin Tyres, he is responsible for Global Digital Transformation driven by a non siloed architecture and design. His primary expertise areas are APIs, enterprise integration, digital strategy and CRM. In his prior stint, Rajeev was part of the strategic advisory architects team of Salesforce , helping their biggest global customers.

Tanya Vlahovic is a lead architect for eBay public APIs. She is one of the key contributors to revamping eBay's public API program and directly involved in all strategic partner integrations. Tanya is focused on various aspects of API lifecycle: design (including cross-cutting concerns), services portfolio governance, and API maturity model. She authored or co-authored numerous eBay’s technical standards and patterns for internal web services and public APIs. Through public speaking, she contributes to increasing the visibility of the eBay API program. Tanya works in the eBay San Jose office.

Jason Webb is Services Fabric Chief Architect at Intuit, where he works on building tools and platforms to enable Intuit’s microservices ecosystem. Jason is passionate about cloud-native infrastructure, developer tools & experience, and open source. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Northern Arizona University.