PGConf Europe 2026

Since 1995, Alastair has administered, programmed and supported all things database, from Access to Universe, settling on Postgres around 2002. His particular area of interest is integration between open source software, how open source communities can work together and what they can learn from each other.

PostgreSQL Expert

Avinash Vallarapu is the CEO and Chief of Products at HexaCluster, where he leads the development of PostgreSQL extensions and an end-to-end database migration tool called HexaRocket. Before HexaCluster, Avi founded MigOps and served as a PostgreSQL Tech Lead at Percona, and as a Database Architect at Dell. Avi is a frequent conference speaker, presenting at dozens of events around the world. He has spoken at four past Percona Live conferences, delivering 15+ hours of Percona Live sessions to date, and continues to share practical, field-tested lessons from real customer transformations.

k8s Expert

pgBackRest Maintainer

Floor Drees is a Principal Program Manager at EDB, working with and in the open source community. She’s a member of the Contributor Committee, PostgreSQL Code of Conduct Committee, PostgreSQL Diversity Committee, and a PGDay Lowlands organizer. Floor is also a Co-chair for DevOpsDays.

Software Engineer & Engineering Manager

Jan is a Senior Product Manager at Percona, leading the products for PostgreSQL. He has vast experience in the development, deployment and maintenance of enterprise systems.

Professionally, he is passionate about simple solutions that solve complicated problems and user experience that maximizes the product potential.

Privately he is a foodie by day, a tech geek into graphic novels, video and board games by night and parent/spouse in between.

Having spent already almost three years in Percona, most of us learned that he has enough energy and topics to fill in any space and time.

Open Source Contributor

Kai is the Head of Product & Engineering for PostgreSQL. Before joining Percona, he worked as a team lead and as a software engineer at SUSE Linux. He is now focusing on the coordination of the PostgreSQL development and product at Percona as well as acting as an open source evangelist.

Michal Nosek is a Senior Enterprise Architect at Percona with over a decade of experience across roles in software engineering, business analysis, and technical consulting. He combines deep technical knowledge with a focus on aligning database technologies to business goals, helping Percona’s global customers design effective open source data strategies. Michal holds a BS in Computer and Information Science from the Cracow University of Technology and lives in Gdansk, Poland, where he enjoys traveling and windsurfing.

Natalia is a software engineer at Percona, working on Kubernetes operators for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. She joined Percona in 2022 as a DevOps engineer, working on release automation and operator testing, and moved to operator development in 2024. Before that, five years as an SRE running production infrastructure under real SLAs.

Stefan Fercot is a Senior Software Engineer at Percona, working on PostgreSQL and its ecosystem as part of Percona’s PostgreSQL Engineering team, with a primary focus on pgBackRest development and upstream open-source contributions.

As a long-time pgBackRest contributor, Stefan has a particular interest in backup tools, disaster recovery procedures and high-availability architectures. He is also Vice-Treasurer of PostgreSQL Europe, reflecting his active involvement in the PostgreSQL community.

Mastodon: fosstodon.org/@pgstef

Zsolt joined Percona as a software developer in 2017 and has been working on Percona’s database products ever since, initially focusing on MySQL and later switching to PostgreSQL.

He likes to focus on things that make life easier and safer: encryption, authentication, extensibility, testing, and tooling.