Women in AI
Neha Narkhede
Co-creator of Apache Kafka
Neha Narkhede is the co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder and former CTO of Confluent, the company built to commercialize the Kafka data streaming platform. Apache Kafka is one of the most widely used open-source technologies in the world, processing trillions of events per day at companies like Netflix, Uber, LinkedIn, and Goldman Sachs.
Narkhede co-created Kafka while working as a software engineer at LinkedIn, where she recognized the need for a real-time data streaming platform that could handle the massive volumes of data generated by modern applications. She co-founded Confluent in 2014 with Jay Kreps and Jun Rao, and the company went public on NASDAQ in 2021.
Born and raised in Pune, India, Narkhede holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. She is the co-author of 'Kafka: The Definitive Guide,' the standard reference for the technology.
Kafka is now foundational infrastructure for real-time AI applications, powering the data pipelines that feed machine learning models at scale.