Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Spring 2024

Dr. Sanjay Basu, Senior Director, Cloud Engineering – AI/ML, Oracle.
Dr. Sanjay Basu has worked in technology for more than 30 years and currently leads the AI infrastructure, Generative AI, and GPU Cloud Engineering teams at Oracle Cloud. Sanjay holds a Doctorate in organizational behavior and a double master’s in management & computer engineering. He is working on his second PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He is a Life Member of ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE, and a Fellow of IETE. He is a prolific blog writer and author of 5 technical books and holds 6 US patents. Read his blogs at https://sanjaysays.com and https://sanjaybasu0.medium.com/

Nate Bradac, Aeron Performance Engineer, Adaptive.
Nate is a seasoned Performance Engineer at Adaptive, where he is currently spearheading projects involving Aeron, a cutting-edge low-latency messaging and clustering technology. Previously Nate worked at ModelOp building out enterprise solutions to aid in the cloud/kubernetes based deployment and governance of ML and LLM models. Prior to that, he was a principal software architect at 29West/Informatica where he worked on the Ultra Messaging suite of products. Nate's interests include concurrent programming, both within a single process, as well as across processes on a network. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-bradac-1803192/

Matt Certosimo, Data Center FPGA Field Application Engineer, AMD.
Matt has over 12 years of experience working with FPGAs. Studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Matt has been working with AMD Xilinx since 2015. In his current role, Matt helps Product sales and support for Financial Services and Data Center applications.

Tom Coombs, Vice President of Sales, Orthogone.
As an experienced and accomplished global executive, technologist, and business developer, Tom has over 25 years of experience driving growth and expansion for both large-scale organizations and emerging startups. His strong business acumen, advanced technical mindset, and growth-oriented spirit have enabled him to lead teams in developing and delivering world-class strategies and high-value solutions. He is an expert in revenue generation, product design, project management, and various technologies, which allows him to provide valuable insights to his peers, partners, and customers.

Liz Corrigan, Chief Product Officer, Myrtle.ai.
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 defense 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.

Kevin Darby, VP of Execution Tech, CQG Inc.
Kevin's career began on CBOE as a clerk for an options market maker in 1999. He later left college to join the R&D team at Blue Capital Group, building options pricing, risk, stochastic volatility models, and trading bots. In 2011 Kevin co-founded Blue Trading Systems, building low latency algo execution systems. Kevin and that technology were acquired into CQG in 2020. Today Kevin expresses his love of math and money by building ML and AI applications for CQG Algos and other products in C++ and (when absolutely necessary) Python. Kevin and his family live in Chapel Hill, NC.

Laurent de Barry, Senior Director, Global Head of Solutions Consulting, Exegy.
Laurent co-founded Enyx in 2011 at 23, bringing over a decade of experience in ultra-low latency, FPGA technology for capital markets. He led product management for FPGA-enabled trading solutions with 400+ successful deployments. At Enyx, Laurent oversaw product and technology strategy, designing FPGA-based applications for exchanges, banks, and trading firms. Following Enyx's acquisition by Exegy in 2022, Laurent became Global Head of Solution Consulting, leveraging expertise in high-performance trading systems to advise clients on infrastructure optimization. With an engineering background, Laurent is dedicated to advancing cutting-edge technology in capital markets, having previously worked on critical hardware for aeronautical and military industries.

Patrick Egan, Head of Business Development, Shengli Technologies.

Brian Evans, Director, Americas Pre-Sales, DDN.

Scott Feagans, Senior Vice President - Sales Engineering, Options Technology.
Scott has worked in the managed services space for the past 25 years focusing on bringing innovative ULL solutions to the trading industry. He was CTO of 7ticks which was sold to the ICE. Scott was one of the co-founders of NetXpress where they brough the first ever shared layer 1 solution to the industry and eventually sold that business to TNS. Scott is currently at Options IT where he is able to continue to innovate and bring solutions to capital markets.

Kevin Formby, VP Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight.
Kevin, after an ‘explosive’ career as a weapons systems engineer, has worked in telecommunications industry in both the UK and USA. Over the last 25 years he has had roles in several FinTech companies including senior management positions in BT Radianz. More recently he was CEO of the data networking company Datacom Systems. He is now VP of Finance and Capital Markets for Keysight, and is responsible for over all strategy, M&A, customer engagement, and sales to capital markets. He lives in Austin, Texas (though he still retains his native northern England accent). In addition to his corporate career, he is very interested in transportation history and recently published his own non-fiction book about railroads in Texas.

Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center.
Jack has over 30 years of experience in development and business management of financial technology. As CEO of STAC, Jack leads the expansion of the STAC community and the value that STAC delivers to that community. Prior to this, Jack was Head of FX Technology at London Stock Exchange Group, Global Head of Trading Technology at Refinitiv, Global Head of Wealth Management Technology at Refinitiv, Head of Elektron Real-Time Platform at Thomson Reuters. Earlier in his career, Jack was second in command at STAC, helping build it from the ground up in its first seven years. Jack has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and a MS in Financial Markets and Trading from Illinois Institute of Technology Stuart School of Business.

Robert Glanzman, Global Strategic Alliances Principal Architect, Financial Services, Pure Storage.
25+ year veteran of the Cloud and Data industry. Rob currently leads Pure's Financial Services Vertical world-wide. At VMware, Rob was a founder of VxRail, the world’s leading Hyper-converged Infrastructure Appliance and multi-billion-dollar run rate business for Dell | EMC. He also co-founded and led VMware’s Global Innovation Incubator xLabs in the Office of the CTO. Prior to that Rob managed the VMware / EMC relationship for all Global Financial Accounts and architected some of the largest storage and virtualized environments in existence at the time. Rob also worked in various engineering and executive positions at AT&T and Morgan Stanley.

Ciaran Kennedy, Sales, FMAD Engineering.
Ciaran is a seasoned executive with over 20 years experience bridging the gap between business requirements and technology. With a proven record of delivering solutions directly to clients in the fast moving and demanding financial services sector his experiences range from architecting trading platforms to operating businesses with evidence of delivering to stakeholder expectations to the ability to get hands-on with technology.

James Lupton, CTO, Blackcore Technologies.
Based in Bristol, UK at Blackcore Technologies HQ; and regularly spending time in New Jersey at the US Blackcore facility. James’ knowledge and experience have been essential in propelling Blackcore Technologies into the global market. James’ passion for technology, engineering, and innovation began at a young age. Building PCs, working on software projects and then starting his first job at his father's technology company. James is devoted to designing innovative servers built for electronic trading and other performance-demanding industries. James has spent considerable time building out various departmental teams and working closely with clients to improve features and service sets.

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.

Michael McGuirk, Sr Manager, Data Center Marketing, AMD.
Michael leads the Data Center technical marketing team within the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Michael defines new products and solutions based on customer input and ensures they are easy to use and successful across the data center market. Michael has over 20 years of experience at Xilinx, now AMD, and has extensive FPGA and Embedded systems experience. In his current role he is working to define how FPGA’s can leverage AI to better serve the Financial Technology market.

Attila Narin, Vice President of Cloud Engineering, Oracle.
Attila is Vice President of Cloud Engineering at Oracle with focus on various technical go-to-market strategies for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). He joined Oracle in 2020 with a strong background in public cloud after leading the customer-facing engineering teams at Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and Amazon Web Services across EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). In his earlier career, Attila held several software development roles including serving on Bill Gates’ Executive Strategy Team at Microsoft. Attila holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Florida and is an inventor of over 30 patents.

Jerry Nelligan, CTO, XR Trading.
Working in trading industry for 33 years with a focus on High Frequency Trading in the last 10 years with XR Trading. Prior to assuming a leadership role, have been a network engineer, systems programmer, dba, software engineer, and an options market maker.

Eric Powers, Director, Head of High Performance Architectures Infrastructure, Citi
Financial Technology Professional with over 27 years of full stack systems engineering experience. Currently at Citi – Director, Head of Markets Technology: High Performance Architectures – Infrastructure. Responsible for all architecture and engineering of electronic trading infrastructure globally for Citi independent of asset class. Proficiency and proven track record of driving electronic trading technology, innovating new technologies both internally and fostering external development. Recognized leader advising Venture Capital, leading industry publications and organizations. BSEE, STAC Fellow.

Prabhu Ramammorthy, Global Partner Success Manager, NVIDIA - Financial Services and Technology Team (sponsored by Supermicro).
Prabhu is the financial ecosystem partner manager at NVIDIA, He focuses on HPC/ML/AI acceleration for financial services. Previously, he held leadership roles as the head of technology of a margin software firm Dash Regtech, catering to leading investment banks and broker-dealers and served in leadership roles at Big Four firm KPMG/EY as a director in financial services practice, where he helped 80+ financial institutions over the last 10 years. Prabhu holds an MBA from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an undergraduate engineering degree from BITS-Pilani. He is a CFA charterholder, Financial Risk Manager (FRM), and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), specializing in financial use cases.

Ryan Ronnander, Solutions Architect, LINBIT.
Ryan is a Solutions Architect at LINBIT with over 15 years of Linux experience. While studying computer science at Oregon State University he developed a passion for open source software that continues to burn just as brightly today. Outside of tech, he's also an avid guitar player and musician. You'll find him often immersed in various hobbies including, but not limited to occasional music projects, audio engineering, wrenching on classic cars, and finding balance in the great outdoors.

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.

Mike Schonberg, Director, Market Data Technology, Quincy Data.
Mike is a seasoned engineer with over 25 years of experience in the technology industry. He shows great enthusiasm for finding cutting edge and elegant solutions to difficult problems. For the past 19 years he focused on providing low latency, high performance solutions for hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and large financial institutions. He currently co-runs the technology group at Quincy Data and McKay Brothers. Mike has been instrumental in the design and implementation of Quincy's market data distribution platforms. He currently oversees a variety of technology projects including market data distribution and custom low latency network endpoint devices.

Bob Stephens, Sr. Manager, Systems Engineering, Dell Technologies.
Bob is an experienced leader in pre-sales engineering at Dell Technologies. With over 20 years in the industry and 13 years at Dell, he has played various roles in IT, assisting Fortune 500 companies in achieving their business goals. Bob currently leads a diverse team that caters to different industries, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, logistics, and retail. Their focus is on providing solutions for generative AI, HPC, IoT, ADAS, data analytics, edge-to-core-to-cloud workloads, modern applications, video surveillance, archive, data protection, unstructured data management, and tiered storage. Bob resides in St. Louis, MO with his wife and two daughters.

Ken Willis, Application Engineering Group Director, Cadence.
Ken is an Application Engineering Group Director focusing on system-level analysis solutions at Cadence Design Systems. He has over 30 years of experience in the modeling, analysis, design, and fabrication of high-speed digital circuits. Prior to Cadence, Ken held engineering, technical marketing, and management positions with the Tyco Printed Circuit Group, Compaq Computers, Sirocco Systems, Sycamore Networks, and Sigrity.

Daniel Wisehart, Head of Hardware Development, Cubist Systematic Strategies.
Daniel began trading professionally in 1993 and worked on his first FPGA and ASIC designs in 1997. He has worked for 11 different trading firms in all of the electronically tradable asset classes. He has designed FPGA and ASIC solutions for both trading and non-trading companies. He is currently running a team of FPGA and ASIC developers for a large hedge fund that applies ML to its trading and he holds FINRA series 57 and series 24 registrations.

Mat Young, Solution Architect, ScaleFlux.
Experienced and driven professional with over two decades of diverse experience in technology, marketing, and leadership roles. Currently, Mat serves as the Principal Solution Architect at ScaleFlux. In addition to his leadership experience, Mat has a strong background in storage, networking, and applications. He has worked at Microsoft, Fusion-io, Dell, Data General Corporation, 3PAR, and Pillar Data Systems.

Wade Zylke, Regional Sales Director, Hammerspace.
Wade is the Hammerspace Central Sales Director. He has a strong technical sales background in data orchestration and storage technologies working with large enterprise organizations in finance, healthcare, education, HPC, and now AI. He is a graduate of Purdue University and has his MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.