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Neha Narkhede

Neha Narkhede is an American software engineer, co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder and former chief technology officer of Confluent, the company built around it.

Neha Narkhede holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pune and a master’s in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and worked briefly as an engineer at Oracle before joining LinkedIn. As an engineer on the data-infrastructure team at LinkedIn, she worked with Jay Kreps and Jun Rao to build Kafka around 2010, to carry the company’s high-volume activity and operational data as a single pipeline; it was open-sourced in early 2011. In 2014 she co-founded Confluent with Kreps and Rao, serving as its CTO and head of engineering through the company’s early growth.

Work

Apache Kafka. Narkhede was one of the three engineers who designed and built Kafka at LinkedIn, leading much of the early streaming and core work. The system reframes messaging around a durable, ordered, append-only log; the Kafka subject pages carry the full treatment of the design.

Confluent. As co-founder and CTO she helped turn Kafka from an internal LinkedIn project into the platform a company and an ecosystem were built around, including the surrounding stream-processing and connector tooling. She has since moved into investing and co-founded Oscilar, a risk- and fraud-detection platform, of which she is CEO.

Where her work sits

Narkhede’s contribution is engineering at the founding of a now-standard piece of infrastructure: one of the three creators of Kafka and the technical lead who carried it from an internal pipeline into widely deployed open-source software. The work is collaborative by nature — Kafka is a co-creation, and its reach owes as much to the company built around it as to the original design.

Key works

See also: Apache Kafka · Jay Kreps · Apache Avro