Biography

Neha Narkhede is an Indian American technology entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. She is the co-founder of a streaming data technology company, Confluent and has worked in it as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). She is one of the founding members of Apache Kafka, an open-source software platform. She serves as the board member of Confluent. Neha Narkhede was listed by Forbes as one of America’s Self-Made Women in 2020.When she was eight years old, her parents brought a computer for her, and then she started dreaming about working with technology. In a media conversation, she disclosed that her parents instilled a lot of motivation into her life since childhood. Neha Narkhede said, My parents did a number of things that still impact my life today. First they instilled in me a belief that I could do anything. Second, they taught me the value of education. Third, they ensured that I was exposed to women role models.”.Soon after completing her formal education, Neha Narkhede started working as a Member of the Technical Staff at Oracle Corporation in February 2008 and served in the position till February 2010. In Oracle, she was responsible for designing and implementing from scratch hierarchical faceted search.In February 2010, Neha Narkhede joined LinkedIn as its Software Engineer and worked in the position till April 2011. She was then promoted to the position of Senior Software Engineer in April 2011, and she served in the position till April 2012. At LinkedIn, she worked in the distributed systems like LinkedIn’s OLAP engine, Zookeeper, and Kafka. In June 2012, she was appointed as the Principal Software Enginner at LinkedIn. From June 2013 to September 2014, Neha Narkhede served as the Lead, Streams, and Infrastructure department of LinkedIn. Neha Narkhede while talking about Apache Kafka at a tech conference.According to Neha Narkhede, she follows Padmashree Warrior and Indira Nooyi and considers them her role models. She talked about these businesswomen from India in a media interview. She said, I look up to Padmashree Warrior, the ex-CTO at Cisco who is now the CEO and founder of NIO, an electric car startup. I also look up to Indira Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo.”.In 2011, when Neha Narkhede was working at LinkedIn, she, along with Jun Rao and Jay Kreps, created the Platform Apache Kafka. Reportedly, they were working on a project at the company and came up with an idea to develop Kafka as an open-source platform. Neha Narkhede while attending a tech conference.In September 2014, Neha Narkhede co-founded a software venture Confluent and started working as its Chief Technology and Product Officer. In January 2020, she was appointed as a board member of Confluent, which is a Palo Alto-based startup. She founded it along with Rao and Kreps. Later, they decided to begin Confluent as a business to business infrastructure company. In a media conversation, she disclosed how she came up with the idea to leave LinkedIn and start her own venture. Neha Narkhede narrated, I talked to my colleague at the time, Jay Kreps, because he was thinking about the data access problem. I asked him if I could help work on a solution and that’s how we got started. We didn’t start by building technology. Instead we began by investigating the technologies that existed to understand their drawbacks. We concluded that a solution didn’t exist.” From left to right – Neha Narkhede, Jay Kreps, and Jun Rao.Apart from being a businesswoman, Neha Narkhede is also an accomplished author. In 2017, she published a book titled Kafka: The Definitive Guide along with Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino. This book narrates all the technologies created by Kafka. The cover of the book – Kafka The Definitive Guide by Neha Narkhede.In March 2020, Neha Narkhede began working part-time as a startup investor and advisor and started advising several renowned technology-oriented companies such as Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI, Cortex Data, Yugabyte, Metaphor Data, Natalist, and Common Room.According to Neha Narkhede, she likes scuba diving and travelling to distant places across the world. She talked about her favourite leisure time activities in a media interview. She said, I love to travel and I’m an avid scuba diver. My husband and I create lists of cool places to dive around the world like the Great Blue Hole in Belize. There were a lot of sharks around so it was a bit of an adrenaline rush.” Neha Narkhede enjoying scuba diving with her husband.