Karthik is the engineering manager for Real Time Compute at Twitter and co-creator of Heron. He has two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company that specializes in realtime streaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL that was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, Karthik was at Juniper Networks where he designed and delivered platforms, protocols, databases and high availability solutions for network routers that are widely deployed in the Internet. Before Juniper, at University of Wisconsin, he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engine and online analytical systems. Several of these research were spun as a companies later acquired by Teradata. He is the author of several publications, patents and one of the best selling book "Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures." He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus on data management.