PeerTalk Experts

Amy Horn
Head of Diversity Marketing at AWS

Amy Horn started work at Amazon in 1998 as a proofreader for the Amazon Books site. Since then, she has enjoyed a career in journalism; marketing; and diversity, equity, and inclusion. She’s currently focused on learning and teaching best practices at the intersections of technology and diversity in order to build a future that works better for more people. She’s also enthusiastic about motorcycles, bicycles, dogs, and dance.

Jeff Barr
VP and Chief Evangelist at AWS

Jeff Barr enjoys sharing the AWS story to audiences all over the world. Jeff has been in the software business since he was 16 and has worked at startups, big companies, and even had his own consulting practice. Jeff brings a lot of energy, passion, and experience to the table while he focuses on technical evangelism to get developers excited about new technologies. Jeff is a geek at heart and never minds getting his hands dirty.

Imtiaz (Taz) Sayed
Head of AWS Solutions Architecture Community for Data Analytics at AWS

Taz leads the Worldwide Data Analytics Solutions Architecture community at AWS. He engages with diverse customers on thought leadership, strategic partnerships, and specialized guidance on building modern data platforms on AWS. He is a technologist with over 20 years of experience across several domains and enjoys discussions around new architecture patterns, industry trends, career growth trajectory, and life at AWS.

Aaron Edell
Head of Business for Cloud Intelligence Dashboards at AWS

Aaron runs the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CUDOS) business at AWS. He would love to chat about FinOps and how you can optimize in the cloud.

Adam Hill
Worldwide Tech Leader for SAP at AWS

Adam Hill is a Principal SAP Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS with 25 years of SAP experience. During his time in the industry, he has worked for SAP (UK), a number of SAP partners, and several large end user organizations, working on projects in manufacturing, retail, HR, finance, ecommence, and supply chain. At AWS, he is the Worldwide Tech Leader for the SAP Technical Field Community, focused on thought leadership and platform innovation.

Anna Whitehouse
Senior Product Manager for AWS Data Exchange at AWS

Anna’s focus is on integrating data with analytics services and tools to make the ingestion and productization of third-party data as seamless as possible. She would love to chat about the future of the third-party data, data management, compliance, and data quality.

Annie Hancock
Director of Brand and Creative, re:Invent Leadership Team Member at AWS

Annie runs the Brand and Creative team at AWS and has also worked as a key leader on re:Invent for the past eight years.

Banjo Obayomi
Senior Developer Advocate at AWS

Banjo is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, where he helps builders get excited about using AWS. Banjo is passionate about operationalizing data and has started a podcast, a meetup, and open-source projects around utilizing data. When not building the next big thing, Banjo likes to relax by playing video games, especially JRPGs, and exploring events happening around him.

Brooke Jamieson
Senior Developer Advocate for AWS

Brooke is based in New York City and was an AWS Machine Learning Hero prior to joining AWS. Brooke has degrees in Mathematics and Data Engineering, and combines this with professional experience to work together with clients to consult, deploy and nurture intelligent solutions in the cloud. Outside of their 'day job', Brooke is an Advisory Board member of Women In Digital and a regular speaker at a number of international events, as well as guest lecturing at multiple Australian Universities. They are passionate about promoting STEM pathways to young women & members of the LGBTIQA+ community.

Danilo Poccia
Chief Evangelist (EMEA) at AWS

Danilo works with startups and companies of any size to support their innovation. In his role as Chief Evangelist (EMEA) at AWS, he leverages his experience to help people bring their ideas to life, focusing on serverless architectures and event-driven programming as well as the technical and business impact of machine learning and edge computing. He is the author of AWS Lambda in Action from Manning.

David Riley
Head of Video and Creative Operations at AWS

David has been producing video content for over two decades. He started his career in in Los Angeles working on film and TV content. For the last decade, he has been working within large corporations to bring Hollywood-level production in-house to Fortune 500 companies. He currently leads the Video team within the AWS Marketing organization.

David Yanacek
Senior Principal Engineer at AWS

David has been a Software Developer at Amazon for 16 years, building and operating services including Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS IoT Core. Before that, he worked on Amazon’s internal web service frameworks and webserver fleet automation systems for Amazon.com. David is passionate about culture and habits around operational excellence, DevOps, and resilient architectures. Find some of David's thoughts on topics like multitenancy, instrumentation, and load shedding in the Amazon Builders’ Library. Just this month, he joined the AWS Monitoring & Observability organization to continue his passion for making it easier for engineers everywhere to operate their services.

Gabrielle Genevich
Head of Event Technology at AWS

Gabrielle is excited to be part of her fifth re:Invent this year, after seven years at AWS. Gabrielle leads a team that operates the technology making the conference run, including our livestream, mobile app, network, and registration systems. She is happy to chat about being a tech leader at AWS, getting feedback from you on how we can improve your experience at the event, discussing women in tech and the challenges we face, or chatting through hobbies like snowboarding or home farming. Your choice! Gabrielle truly believes we learn more through others.

Jessie-Lee Fry
Senior AI/ML Specialist at AWS

Jessie-Lee’s core focus is on helping customers prevent fraud and account takeover with computer vision–enabled identity verification.

Lien Nguyen
Senior Technical Program Manager at AWS

Lien is a Senior Technical Program Manager for AWS IoT Device Services, managing FreeRTOS and AWS IoT ExpressLink development. Lien has 15+ years of experience in software and embedded software development in both academic research and industrial applications.

Lucio Di Jasio
Principal Product Manager for AWS IoT Devices at AWS

Lucio has held various technical and marketing roles in the semiconductor industry for 20+ years in the US and Europe. He has published numerous articles and technical books on programming for embedded control applications. Lucio is also passionate about hiking, cycling, flying, and has achieved both FAA and EASA private pilot licenses.

Mary Law
Head of APJ Analytics Acceleration Lab, President of AWS She Builds at AWS

Mary is a highly experienced, energetic technology and people leader with a deep understanding in data analytics and AI. Mary leads a team of analytics specialists that act as trusted advisors and work together with customers all around Asia-Pacific and Japan, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises, in building analytics solutions in the cloud. Mary is the President of AWS She Builds, which has the goal of encouraging more women to achieve their potential and inspiring women to realize their hopes and aspirations through mentoring, providing career advice, and supporting more women of color and underrepresented minorities in technology careers.

Michelle Matthews-Alexander
Global Head of AWS ID&E Marketing, Communications, Customer Engagement & Events at AWS

Michelle Matthews-Alexander has spent the last 14 years of her career immersed in the world of multicultural marketing and communications. Her infectious energy and experience in this space, coupled with her ability to understand diverse audiences and drive organizational change has allowed her to create meaningful impact in the automotive industry, long before social unrest reached the doors of some of the world’s largest brands. Today, Michelle serves as the Global Head of ID&E Marketing, Communications, Customer Engagement & Events for AWS, a position she’s been in since 2021.

Nataliya Godunok
Senior Specialist Technical Account Manager at AWS

Nataliya is a Specialist Technical Account Manager at AWS, working with some of our largest customers, leading global projects, training colleagues, and creating content on cost management and optimization topics. She helps customers build and design their AWS infrastructure in a cost-efficient way. In her free time, Nataliya loves traveling, playing music, and playing video games! Nataliya is open to chatting about switching career paths from a non-tech to a technical role, about what it means to work in tech teams while being “the only minority in the room,” or other topics related to careers at AWS.

Prarthana Karmakar
Software Development Manager at AWS

Prarthana is a Software Development Manager at AWS. She have been in the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) org for the last four years. She is passionately involved in hiring diverse people for Amazon, women-in-technology (WIT) initiatives, career growth, and all things technology. Prarthana would love to talk to you about Amazon EBS, WIT, jobs, hiring at Amazon, career development, and more.

Ricardo Sueiras
Developer Advocate for Open Source at AWS

Ricardo has over 30 years spent working in the technology industry, helping customers to solve business problems with emerging technologies, open source, and cloud. He is a Developer Advocate at AWS, focusing on open source. Ricardo helps raise awareness of AWS and our customers’ open-source projects and technology and helps make AWS a great place to run your open-source software.

Steph Gooch
Senior Commercial Architect at AWS

Steph is a Senior Commercial Architect in the AWS OPTICS team. She specializes in helping customers with Cost Optimization, Financial Processes and developing a Cost Aware Culture. Currently, she supports Telco customers to develop cloud utilization, improve their cost tracking and educated them on a range of topics including automation for cost savings. She is the host of a weekly Twitch show called The Keys to AWS Optimization.

Viktor Goldberg
Head of Event Engineering at AWS

Viktor leads the Event Engineering team that, among other things, provides the network for AWS re:Invent. During his five-year tenure at AWS, he’s worked in a variety of different roles and teams, from Professional Services and Solutions Architecture to Product Management and Engineering. He’s passionate about tech leadership, standing up new teams to realize innovative ideas, bringing products to market, engineering excellence, and mentoring others on how to succeed in the tech industry. Talk to him about career development at AWS, or any technology or product-related topics.

Adrian R. SanMiguel
Principal Partner Solutions Architect for Strategic Partner Engagements at AWS

Adrian is a 21-year professional solutions architect, with a heavy emphasis on working on architecture and practice-building with systems integrators (SIs) and managed service providers (MSPs) for the last 16 years.

Adrian is currently a Principal Partner Solutions Architect assigned to advising and guiding the technical roadmap for AWS strategic partner engagements.

Arnaud Jean
AWS Solutions Architect at AWS

Arnaud is an AWS Solutions Architect in the sports and manufacturing verticals. He would love to discuss with you on these verticals or any technologies around IoT or data and analytics.

Gareth Eagar
Senior Solutions Architect at AWS

Gareth is a Senior Solutions Architect, with a focus on data analytics, and enjoys helping customers build world-class systems on AWS. He has been involved in building out large data platforms and data mesh projects and is motivated by the challenges involved in these complex projects. He also authored the book Data Engineering with AWS, which provides an introduction to data analytics on AWS. Gareth would love to meet up and talk about anything AWS or data-related!

James Devine
Principal Solutions Architect at AWS

James Devine is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS with a passion for AWS networking and all things cloud. He brings a rich background in on-premises and cloud architectures as well as product development and management expertise. James has partnered with customers from US government agencies, financial institutions, utilities, and manufactures, transforming their architectures to embrace cloud. He is a public speaker and an author of multiple whitepapers, blogs, and the book, AWS Certified Advanced Networking Official Study Guide.

Jenny Vega
Solutions Architect at AWS

Jenny is a Solutions Architect with experience in machine learning and data engineering. She is also passionate about artificial intelligence and robotics.

Justin Plock
Principal Solutions Architect at AWS

Justin is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS focused on fintech startups. Justin regularly meets with fintech founders to help them ensure their businesses are secure and compliant with industry regulations. Prior to AWS, Justin was a Director of Cloud Enablement at a Fortune 200 insurance carrier and a Director of Engineering at a cybersecurity firm. He is passionate about helping startups develop securely and efficiently on AWS.

Marcos Perez Seoane
Senior Storage Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS

Marcos is a Senior Storage Specialist Solutions Architect with more than 20 years of experience in traditional data center infrastructure. Marcos joined AWS in 2021 as a Solutions Architect aligned to AWS Backup to help customers on their journeys to the cloud with a focus on storage and data protection.

Prasad Rao
Principal Partner Solutions Architect at AWS

Prasad Rao is a Principal Partner Solutions Architect for AWS based out of the UK. His focus areas are .NET application modernization and Windows workloads on AWS. He leverages his experience to help AWS Partners across EMEA support their long-term technical enablement for building scalable architectures on AWS. He also mentors diverse people who are new to cloud and would like to get started on AWS.

Sehyun Lee
IoT Specialist Solutions Architect

Sehyun (Albert) Lee, IoT Specialist Solutions Architect, provides many IoT customers with technology strategies to achieve business success using various services in the cloud. He has various experiences with many customers in various industries such as Manufacturing, Home IoT, and Automotive.

Shivansh Singh
Principal Solutions Architect at AWS

Shivansh is a technology leader at AWS with over 14 years of experience in software development, solutions architecture, platform automation, technical sales and business development. He would love to chat about builder experience, infrastructure automation, AWS DeepRacer, and Well-Architected on AWS.

Sona Rajamani
Solutions Architect Manager for Strategic Accounts at AWS

Sona is an AWS Strategic Accounts Solutions Architecture (SA) Manager. Sona joined Amazon in 2017 as a SA, and over the past four years has supported some of the largest strategic customers in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an SA Manager, Sona is passionate about building and maintaining a high-performing team through a culture of trust, impact, and empowerment, not only for AWS customers but also for peers and community. She often gets asked to talk about the life of an SA, women in SA careers, hiring processes, and navigating Amazon culture.

SriHari Thotapalli
Principal Solutions Architect for Travel and Hospitality at AWS

SriHari is a technology leader at AWS helping travel and hospitality (T&H) customers innovate using AWS Cloud to enhance customer experiences and improve operational efficiency. SriHari leads the technical field community for T&H that supports internal AWS teams and AWS Partners creating technical assets, reference architectures, and solutions. Prior to joining AWS, he spent over 20 years in hospitality, CPG, retail, and healthcare industries leading data and analytics strategy. He also held enterprise architecture roles and built products for bookings, hotel operations management, revenue management and distribution, customer 360, healthcare AI, and supply chain optimization. Talk to Srihari about all things data.

Zamira Jaupaj
Solutions Architect at AWS

Zamira has over 10 years of multi-national experiences designing and implementing critical and complex solutions with serverless, analytics, and artificial intelligence for small and enterprise companies. Zamira has run production workloads at scale on AWS since 2012 and has been an architect and principal DevOps in a variety of industries ranging from banking, ecommerce, and sports streaming. Zamira has been recognized as an AWS Community Hero and one of the top ten worldwide AWS Partner Ambassadors by AWS before joining AWS. Zamira founded AWS User Group Albania and has co-organized the AWS Community Day in the Netherlands for more than five years (with very special guest this year Werner Vogels). Since joining AWS in 2021, Zamira has, together with three peers, launched the Let’s Architect project.

Aerin Booth
Cloud Sustainability Advocate

Aerin Booth is a Cloud Sustainability Advocate and queer tech founder. They’re on a mission to get more developers talking about the climate impact of cloud computing. Aerin started their career working with digital teams in the UK government before becoming the Head of Cloud at the UK Home Office. They left their job last year to set up their own consultancy focused on reducing carbon emissions in cloud and IT. They are focused on empowering others to advocate for more sustainable business practices and hosts a podcast focused on cloud sustainability, Public Cloud for Public Good.

Alex Kearns
Senior Consultant at Inawisdom

Alex is a Senior Consultant at Inawisdom, an AWS Partner specializing in data and machine learning. He is an AWS Ambassador as well as an AWS Community Builder and can give insights into what being a part of those programs entails. Topics that Alex is most interested in talking about include serverless, modern data architectures, and MLOps; however, he is happy to speak about almost anything AWS. He is also keen to connect with architects and builders with experience in event-driven architectures.

Allen Helton
Cloud Architect at Tyler Technologies

Allen is an AWS Serverless Hero and Cloud Architect at Tyler Technologies. He has worked in the public sector for ten years and strives to bring modern, serverless architectures and strong APIs with exceptional developer experience with him wherever he works.

Ben Kehoe
Cloud Architect

Ben is a Cloud Architect and an AWS Serverless Hero. His focus is on how to build more effectively in the cloud to enable better focus on what differentiates you. His areas of expertise include serverless, infrastructure as code, identity and security, and IoT.

Cyril Bandolo
Senior Serverless Developer at Serverless Guru

Cyril Bandolo is an AWS Machine Learning Hero, currently working as a Senior Developer with Serverless Guru. Cyril is open to chatting on anything related to data science, machine learning, and going serverless with data.

Dzenan Dzevlan
DevOps Expert and AWS Community Hero

Dzenan is an AWS Community Hero and DevOps expert who has worked with AWS since 2011. He is passionate about AWS, DevOps, databases, and security. He holds several AWS, security, and database-related certificates.

Ed Miller
Senior Principal Engineer at Arm and Developer at BearID Project

Ed leads technical engagements with strategic partners for Arm. He also develops deep learning application for identifying individual brown bears for non-invasive monitoring and conservation. Ed is especially interested in IoT, ML at the edge, AWS Graviton, and technology for wildlife. Come see his dev chat, “Conserving wildlife with serverless, ML, and citizen science” (COM310).

Filip Pýrek
Serverless Architect at Purple Technology

Filip Pyrek is Serverless Architect at Purple Technology, developing and operating software for regulated global fintech companies. He has successfully pushed for wide customer adoption of a technology as progressive as serverless, despite strict regulatory environments. At the age of 23, Filip is one of the youngest AWS Heroes. He started his serverless journey back in 2016 when he was 17 years old. He is helping grow the serverless community in the Czech Republic and Slovakia by organizing Serverless Brno meetups, contributing to local podcasts, writing serverless blog posts in the Czech language, and doing other evangelization activities.

Hubert Chan
Data Platform Practice Leader and Principal Solutions Architect at NorthBay Solutions

Hubert is a highly motivated hands-on Senior Technical Enterprise Architect and Senior Leader with 20+ years of IT experience in management consulting, technical IT project delivery, project management, and software product development. Hubert provides AWS-centric cloud data platform and data engineering solutions, and he delivered an accelerated data platform migration in eight months to AWS and Snowflake across three banners for a 9B retail enterprise.

Janos Tolgyesi
Machine Learning Team Leader at Neosperience

Janos is a Technical Lead of the Machine Learning team at Neosperience. His team has successfully faced various ML-related challenges, mostly from the field of computer vision and video analysis, but also processing tabular data and natural language. Recently, his two focuses were video analytics with AWS Panorama and ML engineering aspects of deploying models in production.

Jimmy Dahlqvist
Head of AWS Technologies at Sigma Technology Cloud

Jimmy is an AWS Ambassador, AWS Community Builder, and AWS Certification Subject Matter Expert. Jimmy has been working with AWS Cloud since early 2016 and currently holds 12 active AWS Certifications. Jimmy is super passionate about IoT, serverless, and event-driven architecture, which he’s more than happy to talk about. Black coffee is his morning drink, and he would not be able to start the day without it.

Karolina Boboli
AWS Cloud Architect at Transition Technologies PSC

Karolina works as an AWS Cloud Architect at Transition Technologies PSC and as a consultant. She has experience in cloud security, cloud governance, cost management, landing zones, serverless, and Industrial IoT. As a technical leader and mentor, she is also involved in building and guiding cloud teams. In 2019, Karolina founded a vibrant cloud community, swiatchmury.pl, a Slack for cloud professionals focused on AWS, which she runs on a daily basis. The goal of the community is to have a friendly place to ask questions, inspire each other, and simply be together. Karolina is open to talking about cloud teams and communities as well as cloud governance and landing zones or any other cloud-related area she has experience in.

Kesha Williams
Senior Principal at Slalom

Kesha Williams is an award-winning technology leader with a passion for hands-on building and developing the next generation of leaders. She’s recognized by Amazon as an AWS Machine Learning Hero, AWS Ambassador, and Alexa Champion. She currently serves as the Program Director for Slalom’s AWS Cloud Residency. She’s happy to chat about jumpstarting your cloud career, beginning your machine learning journey, and migrating and modernizing your legacy Java applications.

Martin Paradesi
AWS Community Builder and Engineering Manager

Martin Paradesi is an AWS Community Builder in the Machine Learning track, the organizer of the AWS Machine Learning Community: New York City meetup and a finalist at the AWS DeepRacer League Championship Cup 2022. His primary interests are in the AWS Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Textract, AWS DeepRacer and AWS DeepComposer.

Matt Houghton
Data Architect at CDL Software

Matt is Data Architect at CDL Software where he spends his time undertaking R&D and working with customers and CDL teams on their most challenging and complex data problems. Matt is an AWS Community Builder and holds all 13 AWS Certifications. In 2021, Qlik named Matt one of their 50 Global Luminaries for driving measurable impacts from data and sharing with the community. Chat to Matt about data and analytics architecture and solutions run on AWS.

Michal Brygidyn
Ethical Hacker at Xebia

Michal is an experienced ethical security researcher, cloud solutions architect, AWS Ambassador, conference speaker, and a lecturer at a university. Michal is passionate about finding sources of leaking data, chaining small misconfigurations, and getting admin access to your environment to help you become more secure.

Rian Brooks-Kane
Senior Solutions Architect

Rian Brooks-Kane (or RBK for short), is a Solutions Architect and AWS Ambassador working for an Advanced Tier Services AWS Partner in Australia called Idea 11. RBK works with a wide range of organizations, from startups and ISVs to SMBs and enterprises, helping them take advantage of the cloud. He specializes in and loves talking about cloud strategy, cloud transformation, infrastructure, security, networking, and cost optimization.

Rob Koch
Principal of Data Engineering at Slalom Build

Robert is Principal of Data Engineering at Slalom Build and one of the community leaders of DeafintheCloud.com. He helps drive cloud-based architecture, blogs about migrating to the cloud and use of lambdas, and loves to talk cloud data and event-driven systems. In a recent lightning talk, he gave an overview of how Amazon Redshift has a symbiotic relationship with PostgreSQL.