Speaker Biographies – New York, Spring 2022

Pavel Anni, Principal Customer Engineer, SambaNova Systems.
Pavel works with customers and partners to help them implement complex solutions using modern AI/ML technologies developed by SambaNova Systems and the AI community. Pavel has 25+ years of experience working for companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Red Hat.

Jon Axon, Managing Director, Packets2Disk.
Jon founded Packets2Disk in 2009. Originally a software engineer, he has a strong understanding of current technologies and monitoring requirements in the Network, Trading and Market Data fields. Packets2Disk’s focus is on developing packet capture and analytics software for finance clients, which is high performance and cost effective, and which allows open data flow between P2D software and other analytics tools. Prior to founding Packets2Disk, Jon held senior positions in several Network Equipment Manufacturers and Network Management companies. Jon has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University.

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Bishop ensures that STAC’s research, benchmark standards, and software tools meet the needs of STAC’s community. He has over 30 years of experience, including research roles at State Street, IBM Research, and Computational Logic, Inc. in diverse areas including machine learning, automated reasoning, formal verification, embedded systems, and computer energy management. Before joining STAC, he contributed to new STAC benchmarks and developed STAC Benchmark implementations on multiple platforms. Bishop is an IBM Master Inventor, Senior Member of the IEEE, has passed the CFA Exam Level III, and holds a BS in Chemistry and BA and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Boni Bruno, Principal Architect and Workload Specialist, Amazon Web Services.
Boni is a principal architect and lead workload specialist for AWS. He is an evangelist for Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, and Digital Transformation and regularly gives talks around these subject areas. He has 25+ years deploying high-speed, low-latency distributed systems with multi-petabyte storage capacity that scale. Boni configured the AWS system for the STAC-M3 audit results presented at this summit. Boni holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology.

Samantha Coyne, Managing Partner of InterCo Trading LLC & Consultant for ScotiaBank.
Samantha is the Managing Partner of InterCo Trading LLC. InterCo is presently working with the Scotiabank to develop strategic eTrading capabilities for the Global Fixed Income markets. Her career has focused on using high-performance trading technology develop sustainable, client-focused liquidity solutions. Prior to founding InterCo, Samantha was the Global Head of KCG’s Acknowledge FI business, a direct-to-client market maker designed to help clients effectively transfer risk in US Treasuries. Acknowledge FI was the descendent of GETCO’s GetDirect liquidity platform, which she also founded. Samantha previously held roles at Citi, State Street and BrokerTec. She holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College.

Davor Frank, Sr. Manager Field Apps Engineering, AMD.
Davor is the Senior Manager Field Applications Engineering at AMD. Davor started his career in Investment Banking technology, transitioning from the traditional Enterprise UNIX Infrastructure towards low latency trading infrastructure in the late 2000s. Since joining Solarflare, he spent the past decade focusing on applications and systems consulting, providing system and software architecture guidance to customers looking to improve performance of mission critical trading applications. Davor holds a degree in Computer Science from University of Zagreb.

Mike Galime, Director, Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies.
Mike is part of Keysight’s team which focuses on monitoring and test solutions directed at exchanges, investment banks and hedge funds. Mike is based in New York State and was responsible for the development of TradeView, the first multicast gap detection packet broker in the world, Mike enjoys putting the garnered financial markets expertise to use within Keysight’s Finance industry solutions team. Mike, who previously worked as an Air Force contractor in the field of Bayesian and causal analysis, has a background in music and entertainment to fill his time outside the technology community.

Francisco Girela, Americas WR Tech Responsible, Orolia.
Francisco holds a Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Granada. He joined the Timing Keepers group at the same university as a researcher. During his research, he specialized in ultra-accurate time transfer systems, and he focused on the development of the White Rabbit technology. Lastly, Francisco has led the expansion of White Rabbit High Accuracy timing in the North American market and in the finance sector with Orolia (formerly Seven Solutions). His work involves the deployment of very long distance WR links and the integration of the HATI core in third party FPGA based devices.

Pete Goddard, CEO, Deephaven Data Labs.
Pete’s a 27-year industry veteran and the founding CEO of two companies. An Aero Engineer, he managed derivatives trading and tech groups at banks and trading shops. In 2005, he founded Walleye, an options market-maker, later diversifying it toward other algo trading. Today it’s a quant fund managing $4 billion. Pete spun out proprietary data software in 2017 and stopped running risk. The system became Deephaven, a general-purpose, real-time-and-batch data framework used by a range of personas for app-dev, AI, analytics, monitoring. Recently, Pete led his engineers to further modularize Deephaven software and deliver it to the open-source community.

Michael Gorbovitski, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley.
Michael has been in the technologically fast-paced and ultra-low-latency business of Automated Options Market Making for the last decade. Before that, he was a founder of several startups in the biotech and bioinformatics sectors, while also maintaining advisory board positions in medical AI and remote learning startups. He got his PhD in Computer Science in 2010 in New York, Stony Brook, with multiple papers published in the fields of Computer Science as well as Biotechnology, as well as several patents. He is a practicing member of the ACM.

Renen Hallak, CEO and Co-Founder, VAST Data.
Prior to founding VAST, Renen led the architecture and development of an all-flash array at XtremIO, from inception to over a billion dollars in revenue while acting as VP R&D and leading a team of over 200 engineers. XtremIO is the world's leading all flash array, with over 40% market share and unprecedented growth from zero to three billion dollars of revenue in under three years. Earlier, Renen developed a content distribution system at Intercast, from inception to initial deployment and acted as Chief Architect. Renen was also a member of the CTO team at Time to Know.

Costa Hasapopoulos, Chief Field Technology Officer & World Wide VP Business Development, Pavilion Data Systems.
Costa has over 35 years of experience in IT hardware, software, and solutions, including over 20 years in the storage industry. His experience is focused on understanding customer needs and “solving real world problems with technologies.” Costa has held many executive leadership roles and sold and designed storage solutions for some of the largest enterprises, financial institutions, and health insurance providers. His career in the storage industry started when shared storage solutions were just coming to market, so he knows the market and its evolutionary changes. Costa has also served as an advisor to several VCs and Private Equity-backed companies.

Pete Kapusta, Senior Director of Sales Engineering, ScaleFlux.
Pete has over 20 years of technical leadership experience helping customers leverage solid-state NAND flash memory solutions for application acceleration in all industry verticals. Throughout his career, Pete has built and led highly successful customer-facing technical teams at a number of global technology companies, including Dell EMC, Commvault, Fusion-io / SanDisk, and Veeam.

Kurt Kuckein, Sr. Vice President of Marketing, DDN.
Kurt is vice president of marketing for DDN, based in Silicon Valley with responsibilities for Product and Corporate Marketing. A storage industry veteran with a particular focus on the needs of advanced computing applications, Kurt joined DDN in 2015 and has held roles in product management and marketing. Prior to joining DDN, he was a product manager for backup and recovery solutions at EMC in the Data Protection Division, ran marketing and product management for the Storage Solutions Group at Silicon Graphics (SGI), and way back when ran special IT projects for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Peter Lankford, Founder and Executive Chairman, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter led the creation of STAC in 2006 to reduce the enormous time and effort the finance industry invests in evaluating high technology. As Executive Chairman, Peter focuses on key growth initiatives and ensures that STAC continues to strengthen the principles and practices that the community values. Peter has over 30 years of experience in technology and financial services, including SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters and management positions at Citibank, First Chicago, and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Master’s in International Relations, and Bachelor’s in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Jeff Lumish, Director of Digital Design, Silicon Creations.
Jeff leads the digital design group at Silicon Creations (2006), an industry leading IP provider for ASIC connectivity. In his time at Silicon Creations, he has been involved with the development of numerous analog and digital IP products, including Silicon Creations’ ultra low-latency SerDes IP. His interest areas include SerDes architecture, serial interfaces, and digital design and verification techniques. He holds the BSEE and MSEE degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Luke Markham, Machine Learning Engineer, Graphcore.
Luke is a Machine Learning Engineer at Graphcore, a start-up building supercomputers to enable next-generation ML, where he works with financial services customers to maximise the performance of their HPC and ML models. He has worked on a variety of data-related problems with investment banks, hedge funds, dark pool providers and real-time trade analytics platforms. After studying Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, he worked as a data science consultant for 3 years at Tessella UK. Interested to discuss all forms of computationally tricky workloads, applications of ML in financial services, and how we can increase trust in statistics and ML.

Peter Nabicht, President, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent nearly 20 years driving change at the intersection of technology and complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage this experience to guide the continued rapid growth of the STAC community. His key roles prior to STAC include: CTO of Allston Trading, developing and supporting multi-asset, low latency trading systems; Co-founder of 12Sided Technology, which developed high-throughput network data capture and analytics; and Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a BA in English and a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.

Andrew Onan, Platform Storage Engineer, Millennium Partners.
Andrew is a technologist with 8 years of experience working at hedge funds and prop shops in various roles. He started his career in the high frequency infrastructure and real time market data space, where he worked with quantitative trading teams to help build low latency trading platforms that processed millions of packets per second at microsecond latencies. Since then he grew an interest in large scale and high performance storage platforms which host historical market data. He now works in a storage focused role dealing with petabyte scale and billion file problems.

Parviz Peiravi, Global CTO for Financial Services Industry Solutions, Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Parviz is primarily responsible for designing and driving development of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Service Oriented/Microservices Architecture, Cloud, and IoT computing architectures in support of Intel’s focus areas within financial Services Industry. Parviz has been working with number of financial institutions worldwide in designing innovative solutions, drive the digital transformation, using the most relevant advanced technologies and performance engineering principles such as Hybrid Multi-Cloud infrastructure, multi-channel systems for retail banking, KYC/AML/fraud detection with federated Learning, Market surveillance, risk management systems, marketing campaign management, algorithmic trading.

Ulku Rowe, Technical Director, Financial Services, Google Cloud.
At the forefront of Google’s cloud and machine learning capabilities, Ulke enables the financial services industry to take advantage of Google’s technology to fuel their digital transformation. Before joining Google, Ulku was a Managing Director of Technology at J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. During her financial services career, she built technology platforms for trading & analytics, middle & back-office, risk management, and finance. Driving business transformation through technical innovation and leadership has always been her focus. MS degree, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; BS degree, Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Fulbright Association.

David Rukshin, CTO, WorldQuant.
David is responsible for the Firm's technology infrastructure, and for the operations function. From 1998-2014, David worked at D. E. Shaw group. Most recently, he led a global team responsible for building a global technology infrastructure platform for quantitative trading businesses. From 2007 until 2011, he was global head of their IT infrastructure engineering and operations. He held a variety of management and technical roles with their IT organization from 1998-2007. Before D. E. Shaw, he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank supporting Equities, FX, and Fixed Income trading desks. David started his career in 1996 as a systems programmer at AT&T Labs Research. He holds M.S. in Technology Management from Columbia University, and B.S. in Management Science and Information Systems from Rutgers University.

John Sabasteanski, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco Systems.
John is responsible for the data center networking product requirements of the Financial Services Industry and Global Enterprises for cisco. At one time or another, most of the world’s largest banks have had data center designs that John influenced. John’s second stint at Cisco came about through the acquisition of Insieme Networks. Prior to joining Insieme, John worked at Big Switch Networks where he led technical sales and support. John’s areas of expertise include Intent Based Networking, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Center Design, Ultra Low Latency Trading, High Availability, Diagnostics and Testing Methodologies.

Vahan Sardaryan, Co-Founder and CEO, LDA Technologies.
Vahan is a Co-Founder and the CEO at LDA Technologies, a known provider of leading high-performance FPGA-based networking products. Vahan’s experience in software design goes back 20 years and encompasses various fields such as high-performance networking, information security, realtime systems and such. He has been involved in electronic trading industry for over 12 years, 8 years of which was dedicated to HFT companies’ needs. Vahan holds a PhD degree equivalent in Applied Mathematics and is an avid chess player.

Adam Sherer, Verification Technology Executive, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Adam drives verification software and hardware sales in Eastern North America with 31 years of experience in verification and software engineering. He is also secretary of the Accellera IP Security Assurance standard working group and often presents on security verification. Adam received his MS EE from the University of Rochester, with research published in the IEEE Transactions on CAD. His BS EE and BA CS were received from SUNY Buffalo. He also holds a 2017 patent in verification technology.

Ranjit “RJ” Singh, Senior Leader – Multi-Cloud Strategy, Intel.
A technically proficient, highly analytical Senior Information Technology Executive with international, multi-industry experience in solutions management, digital transformation, multi-cloud adoption, forecasting, systems architecture, and client and stakeholder relations. In my current role at Intel, I focus on helping the Fortune 200 enterprise companies accelerate their technology initiatives by driving foundational vision, strategy and powering its execution through our partners and the related ecosystem. With over 15 years of multi-cloud experience across operations, security and strategic management, I am able to help the C level initiatives get meaningfully translated to actionable outcomes.

Dr. David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, which was acquired by Arista in 2018. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for electronic trading firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems from the University of NSW, Australia, looking at the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Outside of work, David spends time designing, building and racing high-performance solar powered cars in international events and formerly held the Guinness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Alex Stein, Global Head Business Development, Liquid-Markets-Holdings.
Alex is a serial entrepreneur having cofounded and led four startups including FarSight Financial Services, the first Internet brokerage and Gomez, Inc, the leading Internet Performance Management company. Alex was a Managing Director at Two Sigma; while he was there he built the firm’s global Alpha Capture program, which applies quantitative research to identify and extract investment signals in real time from a global network of investment professionals. He also co-led the Client Solutions platform, Venn, and explored emerging technologies, including blockchain and distributed ledger systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at Digital Equipment's VLSI facility in the Advanced Development group. Stein received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1991) and both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Dartmouth College.

Joe Steiner, Global CTO of Financial Services, UDS Division, Dell Technologies.
Joe joined UDS in 2010 after 20 years in the Financial Services industry (FSI). Joe held leadership positions at Bank of America, NationsBank and G.E. Capital. Since 2010 his focus has been to drive continued adoption of PowerScale, Isilon and ECS as the best scale-out file and object platforms to solve enterprise challenges facing Dell’s largest customers. Joe is working with Dell’s top global customers to help define their next generation business & technology transformations – covering automation, data protection, governance, software-defined file and object storage, converged infrastructure and empowering data driven business value!

Adam Sussman, Senior Director, NYSE.