Matthew O’Keefe is a principal technologist in the Technology Strategy Group at Confluent, working on data modeling, schema discovery and management, and Kafka integrations with relational databases. Prior to Confluent, he was on the database engineering team at Oracle, working on product marketing, outbound product management and field sales engineering. He’s founded two software companies, one of which was acquired by Red Hat. He has a PhD from Purdue University in parallel processing. He was also a professor at the University of Minnesota, helping PhD and MS students learn and advance computer science and application development. Outside of work, Matthew likes sailing and boating around Lake Superior and Apostle Islands National Park with his family, friends and dogs.