Speaker Biographies – London, Spring 2023

Luke Bigum, Head of Systems, LMAX Exchange Group.
Luke has worked as a Linux engineer for 20 years, the last dozen being in financial services with LMAX Exchange Group. He currently runs the systems engineering team at LMAX, responsible for all Linux server infrastructure underpinning LMAX's low latency exchange platforms. He loves monitoring (really), and is passionate about applying modern software engineering techniques to managing physical infrastructure.

Nick Bond, Senior Systems Engineer, A10 Networks.
After 10 years in the British Army (mostly cleaning and painting stuff) Nick became an ADC person! Working with ArrowPoint (Cisco acquired and turned into CSS), Radware, Zeus Technology (5 companies, 12 years, same product), and now A10. It’s an interesting space to be in, being the nexus point of network/security/application. Always something new to learn, and technology changing. Outside of work Nick likes to walk on the beach, draw, paint, and stand looking at his moped wondering why it won’t start.

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.

Toby Broome, Senior Director, Field Solutions Architecture, Pure Storage.
Toby has over 20 years of experience in the data storage industry and joined Pure Storage 5 years ago. He has specialised exclusively on file and object for the duration of his career in data storage. He particularly enjoys working with customers to solve problems with innovative solutions, enabling them to maximise the value they derive from their infrastructure and the data they store on it. Having spent 16 years living and working abroad in Europe and the United States, he has worked with a very diverse set of customers spanning all sizes and sectors of industry.

James Coomer, Senior VP of Products, DDN.
Creative technology leader and builder of innovative technologies. Specializing in all things Data - AI, HPC, Enterprise, Cloud, Analytics, AIOps. Working on Strategic Acquisitions, Product Development, Product Marketing.

Liz Corrigan, Head of Engineering, Myrtle.ai.
Liz runs Myrtle.ai’s engineering operations. Liz has been running teams to create FPGA based products and systems for over 15 years. She has developed state of the art mobile telecommunications equipment, shipped defence systems into theatre and led verification activities for security critical applications. Liz is a Chartered Engineer with a technical background in RTL design, verification and electronic systems design.

Laurent de Barry, Director, Hardware Trading Solutions, Exegy.
Laurent co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23 and has 10+ years of experience developing ultra-low latency technology. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads product and technology strategy, while overseeing the development of the next generation FPGA-enabled trading solutions. An electrical and computer science engineer by training, Laurent is passionate about high performance computing and bringing cutting-edge technology to market. Prior to co-founding Enyx, he worked on critical hardware components for the aeronautical and military industries.

Seth Friedman, CEO, Liquid-Markets-Solutions.
As CEO of LMS, Seth is responsible for product vision. He has been an active leader at the forefront of electronic trading for over 23 years, with deep sales-trading, technology, and consulting experience. His history of technology vision includes the invention of a multi-patented FPGA order processing technology proven in the field since 2010. Seth headed Program Trading at Morgan Stanley Japan before establishing the Electronic Trading Services business, which he expanded throughout Asia. At Nomura, Seth established the Quantitative Prime Services business, played a key role in the post-acquisition integration of Lehman Brothers, and was responsible for Electronic Product Management across Asia.

Connor Gervin, Lead Architect, KX Partnership, KX.
Connor has spent the past decade working with various Tier-1 Investment Banks and Hedge Funds in NYC as a kdb+ engineer. Now back in his homeland of Ireland, Connor is passionate when working with disruptive technologies and customers and plays a strategic role within the KX Partnerships organization to bring the value of high-performance time-series analysis to market through the cloud hyper-scalers.

Dr. Nick Huxley, Development Head for the FX eTrading platform, Credit Agricole.
Over 20 years of experience in Front Office IT applications and systems. Nick started in Repo then moved onto Structured Credit, IRD, Fixed Income Algo and now eFX. He has worked in many banks installing Repo systems on the vendor side and then permanently at Morgan Stanley, Citi and Credit Agricole. He has worked in London, New York and Toronto. He has a keen interest in big compute, fast data and fast compute with a strong emphasis on testable and provable improvements. Nick has a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics and a PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Liverpool.

Iain Kenney, Sr. Director & Head of Product Management, cPacket Networks.
Iain leads Product Management at cPacket Networks. His current role allows Iain to partner with the highly experienced engineering team at cPacket based in San Jose and Portland and the product management team to drive the product direction across the suite of cPackets industry leading products. Iain holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Dundee University.

Christoph Lameter, Senior IT Expert, Deutsche Boerse.
Dr. Lameter is a technology leader at the Deutsche Boerse AG, working to stabilize the server communication fabric. He designed the architecture and migration path from Infiniband to high-speed ethernet, developed RDMA software, enhanced the Linux kernel, and was involved with key vendors to enable the seamless and reliable operation of major electronic trading venues. Previously, he created leading HPC and trading infrastructures with cutting-edge technology as the Technical Lead of Research and Development at Jump Trading. As an Open Source community leader since the early '90s, he's had roles in key organizations (Debian, Linux International, Linux Foundation, OpenFabrics Alliance). Christoph was Principal Engineer for Kernel Development at Silicon Graphics, where they developed key Linux kernel components to enable HPC technology. Christoph, still active in development, maintains two Linux kernel subsystems.

Mark Lucas, EMEA Director of Systems Engineer, WEKA.
Mark has had a fast-paced career which included working for Electronic Data Systems, Data Direct Networks, Network Appliance, BlueArc, Virident and Quantum before joining WEKA. His first job was working on BSD Unix Apollo workstations and Sun SPARC Unix servers writing various applications in C with the key goal of designing and building some of the first fast large scale automated data collection and data mining applications. Mark’s career has since evolved to working on various cloud AI projects and multi-Petabyte large customer accounts. These customer projects leverage GPU's, fast shared access file systems and object storage technologies in their pipeline workflows.

Cliff Maddox, Director of Business Development, NovaSparks.
Cliff has over 30 years’ experience in the trading industry. He joined NovaSparks in 2017 as a U.S. Sales Manager and now leads the sales team. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Cliff worked at Activ Financial Systems for eight years, holding various positions in the business and sales organization. Prior to that, Cliff spent 20 years developing his capital market expertise by leading numerous software development projects for wide variety of major banks and trading firms.

Jon Mann, Chief Technology Officer, GFO-X.
Jon has 30 years of experience in Linux Kernel and software development. Has been key in the start of multiple proprietary trading firms focusing on low latency algo development, including Eclipse Trading. Since 2012 provides consulting services on low latency & blockchain technology to various exchanges, banks and trading firms. As one of the founding members of GFO-X has now created the first FCA regulated and centrally cleared platform for digital asset derivatives in the UK and is designing and building a high-performance platform that bridges the gap between current digital asset taker flow and the regulated traditional finance space.

Graham McKenzie, Senior Field Applications Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Graham is passionate about technology and with a career spanning 30 years in FPGA design and support, has helped customers enable new products and capabilities across a myriad of applications. He specializes in the adoption of FPGA and associated system architecture to accelerate application and infrastructure workloads in the data center, for cloud and enterprise across EMEA and beyond. Graham has a BEng Hons degree in Electronic Engineering from De Montfort University, Leicester and worked as an Electronics Design Engineer before taking an FAE role at Altera (now Intel) in 2001.

Calum Mitchell, Low Latency Solutions Consultant, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Calum works as a Solutions Consultant for the Low Latency Group at Refinitiv, joining at the end of 2022 from Quod financial. Prior to working for Quod he spent 6 years at Vela Trading as a Pre-Sales consultant, so a large portion of his career so far has been spent working with clients to design solutions and pair individual use cases' with the most appropriate products. An undergraduate degree in Finance paved the way for a Masters in Computer Science from Queens University Belfast.

Chandru Mullaparthi, Director, Bluehouse Technology.
Chandru is an experienced technologist who has decades of experience building highly concurrent, fault tolerant, mission critical systems; experience that was gained from the numerous mistakes he has made and then fixed them. He and his team have experience in telco, gaming and fintech. His favourite programming language is Erlang but these days most of the work is being done in Golang.

James Mulvenna, Director, EMEA, VAST Data.

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.

Michael O’Sullivan, Engineering Director, Cadence Design Systems.
Michael is an engineering director at Cadence with a focus on verification and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Michael has been with Cadence for over 24 years with various roles in sales, marketing and design services. Prior to Cadence he was a design Engineer at the S3 Group in Dublin, Ireland and at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Michael has an M.Eng. Sc from the National University of Ireland.

Stefan Ott, Managing Director, CEO, Confinity Solutions.
After finishing his studies in computer science in the early 1980’s, Stefan started to work for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (later Deutsche Boerse) as product manager for its price dissemination systems (TPF, DAX display boards, pcKISS, BIFOS). Since then he spent all his working life in Financial Services industry (exchanges, data vendors (eg. Reuters, Telekurs, VWD) focusing on technology for market data acquisition/contribution and distribution. In 2010 joined IBM following its acquisition of InfoDyne, which offered a “vendor-neutral RMDS” and founded his own company “Confinity Solutions” after the successful MBO of two IBM products, namely IBM Websphere MQ LLM and WebSphere Front Office.

Philipp Reisner, CEO, LINBIT.
Philipp is one of LINBIT's founders. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. (comparable to MSc) degree in computer science from Technical University in Vienna. His professional career has been dominated by developing DRBD, a storage replication software for Linux. While this was writing kernel code in the early years (2001), today, he leads a company of 35 employees with locations in Austria and the USA. LINBIT is an Open Source company offering enterprise-level support subscriptions for its Open Source technologies.

Alastair Richardson, Strategic Business Development Director, Data Center and Communications Group, AMD.
Alastair’s has over 18 years of experience in the global fintech markets. A unique front to back perspective having had roles in trading, product, sales and technology roles at JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Barclays as well as several Fintech start-ups including Fixnetix and Metamako. Alastair now runs Global Business Development for Financial Technology at AMD.

Michael Rothenberg, Global UDS Business Development, Financial Trading & Energy, Dell Technologies.
At Dell, Michael manages global business development across the financial services, energy, and HPC sectors for the Unstructured Data Solutions division. Prior to joining Dell, Michael helped make investment decisions in the VC group of NextEra as the lead for technology and commercialization strategy. In his career he has used a variety of AI/ML algorithms on topics including energy trading, scheduling, and hedging engines (power, oil, NG), EVs, smart meters, satellite imagery, robotics, customer outcomes, and HR to name a few. Michael is a practitioner at heart and loves a good conversation around your AI challenges.

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.

Dave Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista Networks.
David is currently Director of Engineering at Arista Networks. He 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.

Tom Stephens, CEO, Techary.
Tom founded Techary in 2012, initially as a London-based Managed Services Provider. Since then, he has led Techary's global growth, expanding the company's services across all key global markets. Techary now offers an extensive portfolio of technology services, including Managed Services, Procurement, Resources, and Project Services. Tom is passionate about innovation and using technology to improve customer experience. His main focus is solving problems to ultimately make a positive impact on customers. Tom's experience includes leading the business through multiple growth stages, building a global operation, and managing relationships with key customers and partners.

Martin Thompson, Head of Platform, Adaptive.
Martin is a Java Champion with 30 years of experience building complex and high-performance computing systems. He is most recently known for his work on Aeron and SBE. Previously at LMAX he was the co-founder and CTO when he created the Disruptor. Prior to LMAX Martin worked for Betfair, content companies with the world's largest catalogues, and some of the most significant C++ and Java systems of the 1990s. He can be found giving training courses on performance and concurrency, and distributed systems when he is not cutting code to make systems better. Twitter: @mjpt777

Dave Weber, Director, Global FSI CTO, Lenovo.
Leads Lenovo's global financial services industry technology initiatives. Dave is focused on low latency, high performance and emerging technologies, as well as on-prem/hybrid cloud, AI/ML, and automation initiatives. He works with financial markets clients to provide advanced solutions, and with partners to build out the ecosystem, as well as with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products and drive innovation. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®. Dave is based in New York City.