👋 I’m Steffen. I’m passionate about streaming and database technologies.
Right now, I’m a Field Engineer at Materialize, where I help customers harness real-time data using our distributed SQL database powered by streaming technology. Before that, I was a Principal Streaming Architect at Amazon Web Services, working on Apache Flink and Apache Kafka. I collaborated with customers to build large-scale streaming applications and improve the tools we offered, ensuring they could process hundreds of thousands of messages per second.
But my love for streaming tech goes way back—I first got hooked while doing my PhD on Complex Event Processing at the University of Munich. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to share my journey by speaking at conferences like Flink Forward, Kafka Summit, and AWS re:Invent. I also enjoy creating technical content like workshops, blogs, and documentation to empower others.
In addition to contributing to open-source projects like Apache Flink, I stay hands-on by exploring new tech like Rust and diving into topics like query optimization. When I’m not tinkering with code, you might find me trying to lure my daughters into tech using cute stickers I’ve collected at events.