Product and Engineering Speakers

Alice is a customer-centric IT leader with 20+ years in the industry with extensive knowledge and experience in cloud security and identity.  She most recently ran the customer adoption and enablement function for Oracle’s entire cloud security portfolio of products.  She joined Oracle via its acquisition of a cloud security company where she ran the customer success organization, which included the trust and security function.  Prior, she drove information security strategy at PayPal, and at Gartner, she had worked closely with customers’ senior executive leadership across a variety of industries to advise them on addressing areas for improvement for maturing and/or restructuring their information security programs.

Allison Lee joined Snowflake in 2013 as part of the founding engineering team and led the development of the query optimizer. She now heads Snowflake’s SQL engineering team, which owns the core query processing capabilities of Snowflake, including query optimization, query execution, and our internal data file format. Before Snowflake, she was at Oracle, where she worked on the query optimizer for the Oracle RDBMS.  During her time at Oracle, Allison was focused on bridging the gap between query optimization and execution through adaptive query optimization. Allison holds over a dozen patents related to database query processing. She received Bachelors and Masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Arjan van Staveren, Regional Vice President Central Europe, is responsible for the growth and local strategy within the Central European region for Snowflake (DACH, BeNeLux, Eastern Europe). In November 2017, he opened the local presence which has now grown to offices in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Zürich and Amsterdam. Arjan has a strong foundation in SaaS sales and building up markets from scratch. Before Snowflake, Arjan held multiple positions at Bazaarvoice Inc., the latest as Regional Vice President Sales, Central Europe. Prior to that he helped build up shopping community Ciao in different regional markets (DACH, BeNeLux, Spain, Italy, France) and in multiple roles, supporting the company being acquired by Microsoft Inc. for 486 Million USD in 2008.

Benoit co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as President of the Product division. Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. Prior to founding Snowflake, Benoit was with Oracle for 15 years as a lead architect for parallel execution in Oracle RAC and a key architect in the SQL Manageability group. Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bull’s parallel systems. Benoit has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus in Parallel Database Systems and holds more than 80 patents.

Daniel Kuperman leads the product marketing strategy for the Snowflake Data Sharing and Data Exchange product areas. Prior to Snowflake Daniel worked as an early employee at MindTickle where he helped shape the Sales Readiness market category. Before that, Daniel led product marketing for Axcient, helping the company become a recognized leader in the Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) space by both Gartner and Forrester. Daniel has spent over 15 years in Tech B2B working for startups as well as established companies like HP. Daniel holds an MBA from Bentley University and a BS in Systems Analysis from UNIP Brazil.

Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Greg spent 13 years at Google, where he was VP of Engineering responsible for a broad portfolio of Google Cloud data analytics and machine learning products and for internal services addressing data analytics needs of all of Google’s businesses. Before Google, Greg spent six years at Sun Microsystems, working on Java runtime environments and operating systems. Greg has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree from AGH Krakow, Poland. He holds over 50 patents.

Joe Goldberg is a Director of Product Marketing at Snowflake, the data warehouse built for the cloud. At Snowflake, Joe promotes and evangelizes the Snowflake product for multiple use cases and industries, working with organizations as they look to improve their data warehouse and analytics environments. Previously, Joe was a product marketer for Splunk, VMware and Symantec. Joe has spoken at numerous industry events including RSA Conference, SecureWorld and the ACFE Global Fraud Conference, and has been quoted in articles from Dark Reading, SC Magazine, and Wired magazine.

After working as a web programmer for a time, Jonathan moved to the vendor side in technical support and later moved into systems engineering. 22 years ago, these first vendor roles were in security. He then moved into database performance and replication for period of time, but ultimately went back to security roughly 15 years ago. Prior to joining Snowflake, Jonathan built the IAM & security line of business at Quest and stayed with the team until the Dell acquisition. He has also held strategy and CTO roles at small security vendors like Lieberman Software and STEALTHbits and joined Snowflake in 2018 at Security Field CTO.

Kent Graziano is the Chief Technical Evangelist for Snowflake Computing. He is an award winning author, speaker, and trainer, in the areas of data modeling, data architecture, and data warehousing. He is an Oracle ACE Director – Alumni, member of the OakTable Network, a certified Data Vault Master and Data Vault 2.0 Practitioner (CDVP2), expert data modeler and solution architect with more than 30 years of experience, including over two decades doing data warehousing and business intelligence (in multiple industries). He is an internationally recognized expert in data modeling and agile data warehousing. Mr. Graziano has developed and led many successful software and data warehouse implementation teams, including multiple agile DW/BI teams. He has written numerous articles, authored three Kindle book (available on Amazon.com), co-authored four books (including the 1st Edition of The Data Model Resource Book), and has given hundreds of presentations, nationally and internationally. He was a co-author on the first book on Data Vault, and the technical editor for Super Charge Your Data Warehouse. In 2014, he was voted one of the best presenters at OUGF14 in Helsinki, Finland.

Kevin has spent over 20 years building data warehouses and data lakes at large enterprise companies on both the consulting side (Accenture, boutique) and the industry side. Prior to joining Snowflake, he owned a services firm that implemented Snowflake and he guided those customers in building new data architectures to make the most of their Snowflake investment. As a former Oracle ACE Director, Kevin is well equipped to help Oracle and other legacy data warehouse platform customers move to the cloud and adopt their workflows to take advantage of unique Snowflake capabilities.

Martin Hentschel received a PhD in Computer Science from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich in 2012. He joined Microsoft Bing as a data scientist where he built products integrating data from social networks into the Bing search engine. In 2014, he joined Snowflake where he is working on security, metadata management, and dedicated services.

Dr. Max Heimel is a Lead Engineer for the core database engine of the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse. In this role, he is responsible for ensuring speed, functionality, and correctness of queries running on Snowflake. He holds a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on modern database architectures, has authored multiple scientific database publications with hundreds of citations, and has worked at IBM and Google before joining Snowflake.

Mike’s passion is data analytics and data storytelling. He joined Snowflake in 2019 after leading product marketing at real-time monitoring and analytics startup SignalFx. Prior to that he spent 5 years at Tableau where he taught visualization best practices and data theory, led the technical product marketing team, and established Tableau’s Enterprise and IT positioning. He holds a BS in Biology from the University of Washington.

Rob brings over 20 years of leadership experience in technology marketing and management to his current role leading product, solution, competitive, content and community marketing. Prior to Snowflake Rob was VP Marketing for the cloud management business at VMware where he led all outbound teams and grew revenue from $10M at inception to $1.7B+. Rob also led product marketing for the cloud infrastructure business and flagship vSphere product line at VMware, growing revenue from $100M to $2B. In earlier roles Rob led product, sales and marketing strategy initiatives at Veritas Software and for high growth software clients while an engagement manager at Andersen Business Consulting. Rob holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from BYU and an MBA from Wharton Business School.

Robert has 25+ years of experience in supporting companies in multiple verticals (Finance, Industrial Automation, Human Capital Management) to solve business problems using database technologies both on-prem and cloud-based. Most recently, Robert ran the database teams for OLTP and DW at Snagajob (Human Capital Management), where he led a lot of migration projects, such as OLTP Relational to NoSQL, DW to on-prem Hadoop/Vertica and then Cloud (Snowflake), Cloud migration. Before this, Robert ran the database teams for OLTP and DW at LandAmerica OneStop, where he served as a Technical Architect and Development Manager for on-shore/off-shore teams. And prior to this, Robert led a software development project team for industrial automation projects, and acted as an individual contributor for architecture, design, and software development.

Ross is a lifelong data enthusiast. Ross leads the Snowflake marketing team in EMEA and is charged with starting the discussion about analytics, data, and cloud data warehousing across EMEA. Before Snowflake, Ross was a product marketer at Tableau Software where he founded the Iron Viz Championship, the world’s largest and longest running data visualization competition.

Simon joins the team with 25+ years of experience working within the Data Architecture domain with enterprise customers advising, designing and developing analytically oriented data platforms. He has worked across most verticals but have spent the most time with Telco, Retail, Finance and Pharma.  Prior to Snowflake, Simon held consulting roles earlier in his career and has been certified as an OGC Certified IT Architect.  Following this, he held technical leadership and technical sales roles with Teradata, IBM, HP, Netezza and Microsoft, where he worked extensively with MPP Database technologies; Teradata, DB2, Netezza, SQL DW and more recently with the Hadoop/Spark Ecosystem. At IBM, he led a Data Warehouse Migration team focused on pre-sales migration assessments for Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server and other DBMS platforms building tools to assist assessment and migration. Since then, he has been focused in the Data Science & Machine Learning field for the last 5 years, primarily with R, but also some Python and Spark. Most recently at Microsoft, Simon worked extensively within Azure with a specific focus on Data, Machine Learning and AI services.

Stuart Ozer has spent much of his career focused on customers and technologies enabling Data Warehousing and Analytics at scale. Stuart co-founded a consulting firm helping customers design and deploy solutions on Oracle, Teradata, RedBrick and similar platforms in the 1990s.  Later, his team was hired by Microsoft to build internal clickstream analytics and ad-targeting architectures using a variety of industry leading relational database and data mining tools.  During his 18-year tenure at Microsoft, Stuart helped evolve the SQL Server platform to address modern analytics workloads and managed an international team who worked directly with customers creating some of the most complex and ambitious applications on the platform. Stuart has also done advanced work in BioInformatics and spent 2 years in Microsoft Research working with database pioneer Jim Gray.  The team’s mission was to empower scientists in academic institutions with modern data management and analytics techniques and tools.

With 15+ years at Oracle, Vinay held senior engineering and management roles in the Database kernel team. He was a co-inventor of RAC Cache Fusion and Active Data Guard Standby, with engineering responsibilities for the RDBMS High Availability roadmap including Exadata. He holds multiple software patents in standby systems, distributed recovery, OLTP performance and fault tolerance. At data unicorn Delphix, Vinay led the development of the database virtualization products for Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. In 2013, Vinay started Delphix’s Solution Architecture practice and made a career transition from building enterprise software to driving product adoption in the field. Growing a global team of 20 solution architects in 4 years, Vinay had the opportunity to work closely with Delphix’s enterprise customers (including Apple, Cisco, Walmart.com, Telecom Italia, Wells Fargo) to accelerate distribution and masking of their largest relational databases and migration to cloud-based microservices. After this, he joined Xcalar, where he owned field deployment for a scale-out relational compute platform available in all public clouds that competed with Spark Core and Redshift. Customer projects at Wells Fargo, Wellington Capital and PRGX provided experience in the challenges of delivering data to business applications within legacy Hadoop-based and early public cloud data lakes.

Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Greg spent 13 years at Google, where he was VP of Engineering responsible for a broad portfolio of Google Cloud data analytics and machine learning products and for internal services addressing data analytics needs of all of Google’s businesses. Before Google, Greg spent six years at Sun Microsystems, working on Java runtime environments and operating systems. Greg has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree from AGH Krakow, Poland. He holds over 50 patents.

Omer brings over 15 years of hands-on experience in cybersecurity to his role as Senior Director of Security at Snowflake Computing. He leads the Security Engineering organization in its mission to protect customer data using SnowAlert and Snowflake for Security Analytics. Prior to Snowflake, Omer was Vice President of Security Operations at a global security services provider and served as an officer in the prestigious IDF Intelligence Corps 8200 Unit. Omer frequently speaks at cloud security forums on the movement towards High Fidelity Security Analytics (HiFiSec) and is passionate about tackling long-standing cybersecurity challenges through innovation.

Benoit co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as President of the Product division. Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. Prior to founding Snowflake, Benoit was with Oracle for 15 years as a lead architect for parallel execution in Oracle RAC and a key architect in the SQL Manageability group. Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bull’s parallel systems. Benoit has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus in Parallel Database Systems and holds more than 80 patents.

Stuart Ozer has spent much of his career focused on customers and technologies enabling Data Warehousing and Analytics at scale. Stuart co-founded a consulting firm helping customers design and deploy solutions on Oracle, Teradata, RedBrick and similar platforms in the 1990s.  Later, his team was hired by Microsoft to build internal clickstream analytics and ad-targeting architectures using a variety of industry leading relational database and data mining tools.  During his 18-year tenure at Microsoft, Stuart helped evolve the SQL Server platform to address modern analytics workloads and managed an international team who worked directly with customers creating some of the most complex and ambitious applications on the platform. Stuart has also done advanced work in BioInformatics and spent 2 years in Microsoft Research working with database pioneer Jim Gray.  The team’s mission was to empower scientists in academic institutions with modern data management and analytics techniques and tools.

Mario Duarte has 19 years of experience as a security professional working in the retail, health care, and financial sectors. He has built and managed security teams, developed and implemented security programs, and managed PCI and HIPAA compliance initiatives for medium and large organizations. Mario holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of San Francisco.

Martin Hentschel received a PhD in Computer Science from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich in 2012. He joined Microsoft Bing as a data scientist where he built products integrating data from social networks into the Bing search engine. In 2014, he joined Snowflake where he is working on security, metadata management, and dedicated services.

Dr. Max Heimel is a Lead Engineer for the core database engine of the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse. In this role, he is responsible for ensuring speed, functionality, and correctness of queries running on Snowflake. He holds a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on modern database architectures, has authored multiple scientific database publications with hundreds of citations, and has worked at IBM and Google before joining Snowflake.

Allison Lee joined Snowflake in 2013 as part of the founding engineering team and led the development of the query optimizer. She now heads Snowflake’s SQL engineering team, which owns the core query processing capabilities of Snowflake, including query optimization, query execution, and our internal data file format. Before Snowflake, she was at Oracle, where she worked on the query optimizer for the Oracle RDBMS.  During her time at Oracle, Allison was focused on bridging the gap between query optimization and execution through adaptive query optimization. Allison holds over a dozen patents related to database query processing. She received Bachelors and Masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Christian Kleinerman is a database expert with over 20 years of experience working with various database technologies. He has more than 15 years of management and leadership experience. At Microsoft, he served as General Manager of the Data Warehousing product unit where he was responsible for a broad portfolio of products. Most recently, Christian worked at Google leading YouTube’s infrastructure and data systems. Christian earned his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Los Andes University, and he currently holds more than 10 patents in database technologies.