Holden Karau

Bio

Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, Apache Spark committer, and an active open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as a software development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holden talks internationally on Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops at home and abroad. She makes frequent contributions to Spark, specializing in PySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety of distributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside of software she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, and dancing.