Ilya is a roboticist turned data engineer. At the University of Michigan he built self-discovering robots and then worked on embedded DSP software with cell phone radios at Boeing. Today, he drives innovation at Capital One. Ilya is a contributor to the core components of Apache Spark and a PMC of Apache Apex with the goal of learning what it takes to build a next-generation distributed computing platform. He has presented at the Spark Summit and numerous tech meetups around the country.