Michael G. Noll

Michael is a principal technologist in the Office of the CEO/CTO at Confluent (company profile, stock ticker CFLT), founded by the original creators of the data streaming technology Apache Kafka®. In a team of two reporting directly to the CEO, he currently focuses on longer-term product & technology strategy and competitive analysis, working with teams across the organisation. Having joined as one of the first ten employees in 2015, he was the company’s first product manager and led one of Confluent’s then three product areas from inception to general availability and mass adoption: large-scale, real-time processing of data with cluster technologies for the cloud and on-premises.

Before Confluent, Michael was the technical lead of the big data platform of .COM/.NET DNS operator Verisign, where he grew the Kafka and Hadoop based infrastructure from zero to Petabyte-sized production clusters spanning multiple data centers across the globe—one of the largest such infrastructures operated from Europe at the time—for use cases such as cyber security, computer network intelligence, and DNS research (patent).

Michael is an active member of the open source software community and a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups such as Strata Data & AI Conference, ApacheCon, and Current/Kafka Summit. On the academic side, he received a bi-national Doctor of Natural Sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) summa cum laude in Computer Science from the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and the University of Luxembourg for his research on how user-generated Web content can be understood and leveraged for information retrieval, e.g., in Web search and in social networks.