Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect. From there, she immersed herself in the world of data streaming and found herself quite at home in the Apache Kafka and Apache Flink communities. She now leads the open source advocacy efforts at Snowflake, supporting Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris (incubating). Outside of work, Danica is passionate about sustainability, increasing diversity in the technical community, and keeping her many houseplants alive. She can be found on X (Bluesky and Mastodon), talking about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.