Alex Christensen

Atlassian Suite Engineering Lead, AppDynamics

Alex Christensen is a native Texan, but the only thing really that Texan about him is that he says "howdy y'all" a little too much. He's been working in the Atlassian suite for the past five years and has become so process-oriented that he tries to estimate his life in story points. Please send help.

Mark Lang

Software Engineer, Cisco

I am a Java developer turned Atlassian Administrator. Starting from ground zero, I have grown our services up to over 30,000 users in Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. When I'm not adding to our Atlassian stack, I chase two kids around, go biking for a mile or 30, and play indoor soccer.

Alexey Matveev

Expert, cPrime

I work for cPrime as a DevOps engineer and a developer. I came across Atlassian applications in 2015. I configured Atlassian applications, developed plugins and worked as an architect. In 2017 I became an Atlassian Community Champion and received the Overall Outstanding Champion award in 2018. I love Atlassian applications and love to talk about them. I spent lots of time solving performance issues with Atlassian Jira and testing Jira performance.

Jose Martin de Vidales Biurrun

Application Engineer, Yelp

Jose Martin de Vidales Biurrun joined the Application Engineering team at Yelp in 2015. Since then, he has been taking Yelp's corporate infrastructure and applications to the next level by developing tools and automations that solve internal challenges. He is the point person on deployments of newly adopted systems as well as improvements for existing systems. His expertise is on enterprise wide applications from all Atlassian suite products, Google, Jenkins, and others. Jose holds a masters in Computer Engineering and prior to Yelp, was a Systems Engineer at The Vitec Group.

Taylor Barrett-Wilsdon

Application Engineer, Yelp

Taylor Barrett-Wilsdon joined Yelp in 2014, and lead the IT team in the San Francisco office until 2016 when he joined the Application Engineering team. He now develops and maintains software applications for Yelp's internal employees, including ownership of the systems engineering, lifecycle maintenance and custom tools for Jira Server, Confluence Server and StatusPage. Taylor is an Atlassian Certified Professional and has performed dozens of rollouts, upgrades and migrations in addition to developing numerous services and applications that utilize the Jira and Confluence APIs for Yelp.

Russell Zera

Lead Delivery Manager, Agile Coach, Elsevier, Inc

Russell is an Agile Coach and Lead Delivery Manager at Elsevier Inc., the world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, and deliver better care. Russell has had extensive agile experiences in the Developer, Scrum Master and Product Owner roles, and now as an agile coach within Elsevier leadership. Russell has 10 years of Atlassian tool experience, primarily in Jira and Confluence across multiple industries, with 8 years of experience administering Atlassian environments. Russell has consulted countless teams and organizations in standing up new Atlassian instances, best practices in tool use, as well as training their teams in the effective use of the tool for organizations and instances ranging from 10 users to 20,000+. Russell is an AUG leader of the Philadelphia AUG.

Gal Fatal

Devops team manager and Tel-Aviv AUG leader, HP

Gal Fatal has over 20 years of experience in ALM solutions, and various development methodologies, including CI/CD process and Agile development. At HP he is the Devops team manager specializing in Atlassian Jira, Confluence, BitBucket, JSD and an array of custom built internal tools, supporting a growing R&D department of about 2000 users. Gal has also been leading the Tel Aviv Atlassian User Group for the past year. Gal holds B.A degree in computer science and management from the Open University of Israel and an MSM in science management from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. In his free time, Gal enjoys playing table tennis and chess.

Jennifer van Leeuwen

Priority Support Engineer, Atlassian

Jennifer has been helping customers with complex software implementations for close to 20 years. She currently works as an Enterprise support engineer on the Priority Support team at Atlassian, assisting customers resolve their mission critical issues with Jira.

Kunihiro Takahashi

Leader, Yahoo! JAPAN

I'm IT team Leader in Yahoo! JAPAN and AUG Tokyo Leader. I have managed Confluence for twelve years.

Joseph Pursel

Jira Developer, Airbnb

As a former Program Manager, I wanted to change my career and become an individual contributor using a development stack of tools. Making the change to Atlassian Tools I have become a Senior Systems Engineer using the AWS/Atlassian Data Center Environment with Jira, Jira Service Desk and Confluence. Other Atlassian experience includes JIRA Portfolio, Bitbucket, Bamboo, HipChat, FishEye/Crucible and Crowd. In addition, I learned how to build Atlassian applications using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) using their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS), Aurora, S3, EBS, EFS, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, IAM, Key Management Service. I also led software development teams to become efficient in the use of DevOps, including Agile Scrum/Kanban, Continuous Integration, Continuous Development and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD/CD).

Curtis Rissi

Sr. Solutions Architect – Containers & App Modernization, Amazon

As a Solutions Architect at AWS, Curtis has a focus on modern app development practices through containers. He enjoys helping customers simplify and resolve frequent pain-points, and become more agile and capable while implementing containerized workloads.

Jay Yeras

Partner Solutions Architect, DevOps, Amazon