Florian has been an open-source and Apache Kafka® enthusiast for a long time and is currently a Lead Software Engineer at Kestra, building an open-source, event-driven declarative orchestration platform. He has over 14 years of experience as a Software Engineer, consultant, and trainer, passionate about and specialized in distributed systems and stream processing architectures. He is the creator of multiple open-source projects such as Kafka Connect FilePulse and Jikkou. Recognized for his continuous contributions to the ecosystem, Florian has been named a Confluent Community Catalyst every year since 2019.

Florian is an open-source community enthusiast and the author of projects such as Kafka Streams CEP and Kafka Connect FilePulse, a popular community-driven Kafka source connector for streaming files from local filesystems, Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. More recently, he started working on Jikkou, an open-source "Resource as Code" framework for Apache Kafka, and Apache Iceberg, designed to help implement GitOps for Kafka at scale. Beyond building software, he has been writing technical blog posts for years, focusing mainly on Kafka and Kestra over the last couple of years.