Thomas is Apache Apex PMC Chair and Co-Founder at Atrato. Prior to founding Atrato he was Architect at DataTorrent and lead the development of Apex from the beginning of the project. Before that he was member of the Hadoop Team at Yahoo! and contributed to several of the big data ecosystem projects. Thomas has developed distributed systems since 1997 and frequently speaks at international big data conferences like Hadoop Summit and ApacheCon and at meetups. Thomas received the degree of Diplom-Informatiker (~M.Sc.) from TU Dresden, Germany and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.