Jay Kreps

Jay Kreps is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Confluent, a publicly traded infrastructure software company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to establishing the enterprise data streaming platform, he served as a Lead Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, where he was the original architect and co-creator of the open-source project Apache Kafka. Kreps guided Confluent through its initial public offering on the NASDAQ in June 2021, scaling the business into a multibillion-dollar enterprise and expanding its capabilities through the 2023 acquisition of Immerok. He holds both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was appointed to the board of directors at Anthropic in May 2024. His current focus centers on advancing real-time data streaming infrastructure, distributed systems, and enterprise cloud computing.