Ryan Belgrave’s journey in technology began in 2005 with his first Ubuntu CD and a struggle to exit Vim, igniting a passion for learning technologies like Openstack, AWS EC2, Mesos, Docker, and Kubernetes. In 2016, he joined Target to build their Cloud Application platform. Later, at Optum, he developed a Cluster as a Service for Cassandra, Kafka, and Elasticsearch, managing thousands of clusters with over 12PB of data. In late 2024, he joined Confluent to expand their WarpStream zero-disk Kafka product. He also maintains a homelab to continue learning outside of work.