Principal Developer Advocate · AI-Assisted Engineering & Real-Time Data · Java Champion

Java Champion Testcontainers Champion Published Author Conference Speaker Podcast Host
GitHub · LinkedIn · Bluesky · X/Twitter · YouTube · Speaking · ai-assisted.engineering

Summary

Principal Developer Advocate promoting the integration of AI-assisted engineering with real-time data platforms. Creator of ai-assisted.engineering, working to improve developer productivity through intelligent tools and agentic systems.

Current Focus: Developing AI systems with MCP (Model Context Protocol), connecting LLM agents to streaming data platforms (Kafka, Flink) for real-time reasoning and decision-making. Hands-on with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains Junie, Amazon Q Developer, and Claude Code — advocating Prompt-Driven Development (PDD) and Spec-Driven methods for structured AI workflows.

Platform Engineering: 10+ years promoting Apache Kafka, Flink, distributed systems, and cloud-native architectures at Confluent, Kong, StarTree, and Hazelcast.

Thought Leadership: Java Champion. Author of Kafka in Action. International speaker at JavaOne, Devoxx, Current, KotlinConf, QCon, Kafka Summit. Conference demos with real-time LLM integration.

Experience

Principal Developer Advocate

Sep 2024 – Present

Confluent

  • Lead developer education for Apache Kafka, Flink SQL, and Confluent Cloud — workshops, tutorials, and conference talks reaching thousands of developers annually
  • Built selectstar.stream — interactive Flink SQL tutorial teaching table-stream duality with animated visualizations
  • Created Flink SQL Playground — live environment for running Flink queries against streaming data
  • Developing MCP integrations connecting LLM agents to streaming data platforms for real-time reasoning
  • Featured speaker at KotlinConf, Devoxx, Current, Jfokus, Devnexus, Iceberg Summit
  • Co-host of DevRel Radio podcast
  • Host of Confluent Developer Podcast and Streaming Frontiers live stream

Head of Developer Advocacy

Jan 2024 – Sep 2024

StarTree

  • Led developer advocacy for StarTree’s real-time analytics platform built on Apache Pinot
  • Created the Apache Pinot Developer Course — comprehensive video series on real-time OLAP analytics
  • Created content and workshops for real-time analytics use cases combining Kafka, Flink, and Pinot

Principal Developer Advocate

May 2021 – Dec 2023

Kong Inc.

  • Led developer advocacy for Kong’s API gateway and service connectivity platform
  • Created and hosted Kongcast podcast and Kong Builders video series
  • Created technical content, demos, and conference talks on API management, service mesh, and cloud-native architectures
  • Spoke at KubeCon, Devoxx, and API-focused conferences worldwide
  • Served as Program Committee Member for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023

Developer Advocate & Solutions Architect

Jul 2017 – May 2021

Confluent

  • Grew Apache Kafka developer community through conference talks, blog posts, webinars, and open-source contributions
  • Co-authored Kafka in Action (Manning, 2022) — practical guide to building event streaming applications
  • Built demo applications and reference architectures for Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and Connect
  • Regular speaker at JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and regional meetups worldwide

Developer Advocate & Solution Architect

Dec 2014 – Jul 2017

Hazelcast

  • Led developer relations for Hazelcast IMDG (In-Memory Data Grid) — the open-source distributed caching and computing platform
  • Created technical content, tutorials, and conference presentations on distributed caching, in-memory computing, and JCache
  • Developed Hazelcast client libraries and integrations (Node.js, Spring Boot)
  • Spoke at 30+ conferences per year including JavaOne, Devoxx, and JFokus

Earlier: Senior Software Engineer at ENSO Financial Analytics and Farata Systems (2009–2014), building enterprise web applications for Fortune 500 clients including Citi and Goldman Sachs. Co-authored Enterprise Web Development (O’Reilly, 2014) during this period.

Publications

Kafka in Action
Manning Publications, 2022 · Co-authored with Dylan Scott and Dave Klein
kafkainaction.org · Amazon
Enterprise Web Development: Building HTML5 Applications from Desktop to Mobile
O'Reilly Media, 2014 · Co-authored with Yakov Fain, Victor Rasputnis, Anatole Tartakovsky
O'Reilly

Selected Talks

The Missing Protocol: How MCP Bridges LLMs and Data Streams AgentCon Toronto 2026 One Does Not Simply Query a Stream Elastic User Groups 2026 Event-Driven Analytics with Apache Flink and Ktor KotlinConf 2025 Stream Processing Smackdown: Kafka Streams vs. Flink Current London 2025 Codepocalypse Now: LangChain4j vs. Spring AI Devoxx France 2025 Uncorking Real-time Analytics with Kafka, Flink, and Pinot Multiple venues Testing Data-Intensive Apps with Testcontainers Multiple venues Streams Must Flow: Kafka Streams on Kubernetes Multiple venues

Full speaking history at speaking.gamov.io

Certifications

  • Data Streaming Engineer — Confluent
  • Program Committee Member — KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023

Recognition

  • Java Champion — recognized by Oracle and peers for contributions to the Java ecosystem
  • Testcontainers Community Champion — for advancing integration testing practices
  • Most Active Speaker — Sessionize, 2023–2025

Education

Moscow State University of Transport (MIIT)

2007 – 2010

Lipetsk State Technical University

2002 – 2007

Master of Science, Computer Science & Information Technology

Technical Expertise

Streaming & Data: Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, Apache Flink, Flink SQL, Confluent Cloud, Tableflow, Apache Iceberg, Apache Pinot

AI & Tooling: MCP (Model Context Protocol), LangChain4j, Spring AI, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains Junie, Amazon Q Developer

Languages & Frameworks: Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, Go, Spring Boot, Ktor, Lit

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Testcontainers, GitHub Actions, Terraform

API & Connectivity: Kong Gateway, API management, service mesh, gRPC

Developer Education: Technical writing, conference speaking, workshop design, video production, podcast hosting

Languages: English, Russian