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Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

apache airflow experts - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Apache Airflow has become a cornerstone of modern data engineering, thanks to a vibrant community of contributors, innovators, and leaders.

From core maintainers and open-source champions to startup founders and tech influencers, these individuals are pushing Airflow’s capabilities to new heights. Below is an updated and ranked list of the top 19 Airflow experts worldwide (2022–2025), selected for their open-source contributions (especially to Airflow), hands-on coding leadership (often as founders or tech leads), public technical influence (blogging, speaking), roles at major tech companies, and notable achievements. Each profile highlights their impact on Airflow or adjacent technologies, community presence, and key accomplishments.

  1. Chris Riccomini
  2. Kevin Yang
  3. Marc Lamberti
  4. Jarek Potiuk
  5. Jens Scheffler
  6. Josh Fell
  7. Bolke de Bruin
  8. Dan Davydov
  9. Tao Feng
  10. Fokko Driesprong
  11. Tomasz Urbaszek
  12. Kamil Breguła
  13. Leah Cole
  14. Niko Oliveira
  15. Maciej Obuchowski
  16. Amogh Desai
  17. Pankaj Koti
  18. Pankaj Singh
  19. Chao-Han Tsai

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable contributions and impact.

Chris Riccomini

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Chris Riccomini is a distinguished data infrastructure engineer and author who has been an Apache Airflow PMC member, bringing a wealth of experience from Silicon Valley’s tech giants. He previously helped develop Apache Samza at LinkedIn and wrote The Missing README, a book for software engineers.

Chris got involved with Airflow’s governance and design during its early Apache incubation, providing guidance drawn from his background at PayPal, LinkedIn, and WePay. He’s an investor and startup advisor who stays hands-on with coding; his current project, SlateDB, is an open-source embedded database. In the Airflow realm, Chris has advocated for workflow best practices and even launched a new “Bauplan” initiative to rethink data pipelines. He shares knowledge via his blog Materialized View and podcast appearances, offering an “insider perspective” on Airflow’s adoption.

Chris exemplifies the multi-faceted expert: open-source committer, big tech alumnus, influencer, and now startup founder who still codes.

Kevin Yang

Nationality: American

Kevin Yang leads the Workflow Orchestration team at Airbnb and is an Apache Airflow PMC member. As an engineering manager at Airbnb, Kevin has overseen Airflow’s evolution from an internal tool to a robust open-source project powering thousands of Airbnb’s machine learning and analytics pipelines.

He co-authored the “Airflow at Airbnb” keynote at Airflow Summit, sharing how Airbnb use and extend Airflow. Kevin was pivotal in developing Airflow’s “Smart Sensor” system to handle large-scale sensing tasks efficiently, and he ensures Airbnb’s contributions flow back to the community. With over a decade at companies like Airbnb and previously Facebook, Kevin combines deep technical insight with leadership in one of the biggest Airflow deployments globally.

Marc Lamberti

The magic of Airflow is not just in how you write a DAG, but in how you think about workflows as composable, testable, and observable units.

Nationality: French

Marc Lamberti is a prominent Apache Airflow educator and influencer, credited with training tens of thousands of Airflow users worldwide. As the Head of Customer Education at Astronomer, Marc has created comprehensive Airflow courses and content, amassing over 90,000 students on Udemy alone.

He began working with Airflow in 2017 and quickly became one of its biggest advocates in the community. Marc produces the popular “Data with Marc” YouTube tutorials and co-authored the Astronomer Certification for Airflow. While he’s not a core code committer, his contributions in documentation, best practices, and onboarding material are invaluable. He frequently speaks at conferences (Airflow Summit, DataEng events) to demystify Airflow for newcomers, and even runs workshops on DAG writing and “What’s new in Airflow 3”. By bridging the gap between complex Airflow concepts and everyday users, Marc has arguably influenced the adoption of Airflow as much as any code contributor.

Jarek Potiuk

Jarek Potiuk - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Nationality: Polish

Jarek Potiuk is one of Apache Airflow’s most prolific contributors and a member of its PMC, known for tirelessly improving Airflow’s internals and release processes. An independent open-source developer and advisor, Jarek played a key role in Airflow 2.0’s development and is heavily involved in the upcoming Airflow 3.0 (he co-leads the effort to modernize Airflow’s core). He introduced the concept of the “Breeze” development environment, making it easier for new contributors to onboard. Jarek is also active in broader ASF initiatives (including security) and speaks at conferences like FOSDEM and Airflow Summit about open-source sustainability. Formerly an engineering leader at Polidea, he helped integrate enterprise features into Airflow and now continues to advise companies on Airflow adoption.

Jens Scheffler

Nationality: German

Jens Scheffler is a Technical Architect at Bosch who turned into an Airflow power-user and contributor by pushing the tool to its limits. With 25 years of IT experience in distributed systems, Jens led Bosch’s implementation of Airflow to automate testing for autonomous driving systems.

He famously shared how his team scaled Airflow to 1.2 million DAG runs per day at Bosch, through iterative tuning and even custom patches to Airflow’s scheduler. This work, presented at Airflow Summit 2024, demonstrated Airflow’s capability in high-throughput, event-driven scenarios. Jens has since contributed some of those scaling enhancements back to Apache Airflow’s code and became an official committer. Coming from an enterprise background, he helps bridge Airflow with industrial applications and often advises on how to achieve reliability and “zero downtime” upgrades.

Jens also participates in the Airflow community via Slack and podcast discussions, exemplifying how end-users can evolve into project contributors.

Josh Fell

The Airflow community thrives because we don’t just write code—we teach, support, and share. That’s the open-source spirit.

Nationality: American

Josh Fell is an Apache Airflow committer and a Staff Data Engineer at Astronomer who has made a name as a go-to Airflow expert on forums and social media. He joined the Airflow contributors’ ranks in 2021, and since then has implemented features like the Airflow connection testing CLI and various provider enhancements.

Josh is particularly known for his community engagement: he is very active on Stack Overflow and on the Astronomer Forum, helping countless users solve DAG issues. This public-facing work earned him the moniker of an Airflow “community guru.” Within Astronomer, Josh focuses on the Airflow ecosystem integrations, ensuring tools like dbt, Great Expectations, and cloud services work seamlessly with Airflow. He has co-hosted webinars (e.g., on Airflow + Azure Data Factory) and appears in Astronomer’s developer content. With his blend of coding and teaching, Josh exemplifies an influencer whose impact is felt through better Airflow adoption and user success.

Bolke de Bruin

Bolke de Bruin - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Nationality: Dutch

Bolke de Bruin is a veteran data engineer and was one of Apache Airflow’s early champions in the enterprise. Formerly Vice President of Apache Airflow (the PMC Chair) around its graduation to a top-level Apache project, Bolke helped formalize Airflow’s governance and guide its roadmap through 2019.

He has decades of experience in banking and analytics (as CTO of Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics at ING), and later joined Astronomer as VP of Enterprise Data, where he helped companies adopt Airflow at scale. Bolke has contributed code (especially around security and stability) and evangelized Airflow in Europe via talks like PyData Amsterdam 2018. Passionate about making organizations more data-driven, he bridges the gap between open-source innovation and enterprise requirements. Under his leadership, Airflow saw better security (RBAC) and extensibility features added in the 1.10.x line.

Dan Davydov

Nationality: American

Dan Davydov was one of the earliest engineers to work on Airflow at Airbnb and later championed its use at Twitter, making him a key figure in Airflow’s spread across companies. As an Apache Airflow PMC member, Dan contributed to Airflow’s backend.

He co-presented a high-profile Airflow Summit 2020 keynote on how Airbnb, Twitter, and Lyft use Airflow. At that time, Dan was leading Airflow adoption at Twitter, integrating it with the company’s data stack and ensuring it scaled for thousands of daily workflows. He has also been active in sharing knowledge, for instance via slides on Airflow best practices at scale (some of which are available on SlideShare). With experience in two large-scale implementations, Dan’s insights influenced Airflow’s direction. He embodies the “best of Airflow” through both code and evangelism, and though in recent years he’s been less visible publicly, his past contributions continue to underpin Airflow’s success.

Tao Feng

Nationality: Chinese

Tao Feng is a veteran Airflow committer and architect who played a key role in scaling Airflow for big data use cases. As Tech Lead for Data Platform at Lyft, Tao introduced Airflow there and contributed features like SLA miss handling and monitorability improvements.

He later co-created Amundsen, Lyft’s data discovery platform, showcasing his broader data engineering expertise. Tao served on the Airflow PMC and was a go-to authority on using Airflow for ML pipelines in large companies. In 2020, he joined Databricks as a tech lead manager, carrying his Airflow knowledge into the realm of data lakehouse pipelines. Tao has shared his insights via Airflow Summit keynotes and blog posts like “Running Airflow at Lyft”, educating others on best practices for reliability at scale. With experience spanning Airbnb, Lyft, and Databricks, Tao bridges open-source leadership with real-world implementation at scale.

Fokko Driesprong

Fokko Driesprong - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Nationality: Dutch

Fokko Driesprong is an open-source polyglot who contributed significantly to Apache Airflow’s codebase and documentation as a committer and PMC member. Based in the Netherlands, Fokko has worked as a data engineering consultant and at companies like Databricks and Tabular, focusing on data lake technologies.

In Airflow, he was known for mentoring new contributors and for his work on Airflow’s testing and CI pipelines. He also contributed to Apache Avro, Parquet, Druid, and Iceberg, bringing a broad ecosystem view into Airflow’s development. Fokko often spoke at ApacheCon and Airflow meetups about pipeline design and workflow scheduling. In recent years, he has been building data infrastructure at Tabular, applying Airflow for orchestrating complex data lake workflows. His passion for open-source shines through a diverse array of projects, making him a respected figure in multiple communities.

Tomasz Urbaszek

Nationality: Polish

Tomasz “Tomek” Urbaszek is an Apache Airflow committer renowned for his work on Airflow’s scheduler and performance improvements. Formerly an engineer at Polidea and now at Snowflake Inc. as a software engineer, Tomek contributed key optimizations that enhanced Airflow’s throughput and stability.

In collaboration with teams like Databand/IBM, he helped identify bottlenecks and speed up the Airflow scheduler, enabling Airflow to handle far more tasks per second. Tomek is also an author on Medium, writing about Airflow usage and functional programming in data engineering. A mathematician by training, he appreciates functional style and even explored it within Airflow’s context. Tomek remains active in the community by speaking at Airflow Summit (he was an organizer for the 2021 Airflow Summit) and supporting new features in Airflow 2. He exemplifies the open-source contributor who brings enterprise-grade performance to the platform.

Kamil Breguła

Nationality: Polish

Kamil Breguła is a Senior Software Engineer at Snowflake and an Apache Airflow PMC member & committer known for major contributions to Airflow’s core and providers. Hailing from Poland, Kamil was part of Polidea’s team that helped Airflow mature; he contributed extensively to Airflow’s Kubernetes Executor and gRPC-based components.

In fact, he was recognized with a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for his work on Airflow. Kamil has a knack for tackling complex issues like Airflow’s upgrade migrations and multi-tenancy features. He also shares his knowledge via Stack Overflow and the Apache Airflow Slack, guiding users through tough DAG issues. As an Airflow maintainer, he reviews many pull requests and has mentored new contributors since 2019. Now at a cloud data warehouse leader (Snowflake), Kamil bridges Airflow with modern data platforms, ensuring it remains a top orchestrator in cloud environments.

Leah Cole

Leah Cole - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Nationality: American

Leah Cole is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud who focuses on Apache Airflow through Google’s Cloud Composer service. As an Apache Airflow committer, Leah contributes code and improvements that often cater to cloud users – for example, integrations with GCP services and better monitoring.

She began her career at General Electric working on industrial IoT projects before moving to Google, which gives her a unique perspective on Airflow’s use in both on-prem and cloud environments. Leah is a passionate community builder: she has spoken at multiple Airflow Summits on topics like CI/CD for Airflow and workflow lineage on GCP. She also engages the community via ApacheCon and Google I/O, often advocating for diversity and new contributor friendliness in open source. With her work at Google, Leah ensures Airflow remains enterprise-grade and accessible, making her a key link between Big Tech and open-source.

Niko Oliveira

Nationality: Brazilian

Niko Oliveira is a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services and an Apache Airflow committer who has been driving the project’s future-facing features. With over a decade in the software industry spanning startups and big tech, Niko now works on Amazon’s data engineering services – his insights have influenced Airflow’s support in AWS environments.

He gave a standout talk at Airflow Summit 2023 titled “Airflow Executors: Past, Present and Future,” where he discussed new executor paradigms to run Airflow tasks more efficiently. Niko has contributed to Airflow’s Kubernetes and Celery executors and is involved in the development of the new “Deferrable” operators that improve Airflow’s resource usage. Originally from Brazil (educated at UBC in Canada), he ensures the Airflow community remains globally diverse and welcoming. Outside of code, he shares knowledge on The New Stack podcast about managing ML pipelines with Airflow.

Maciej Obuchowski

Nationality: Polish

Maciej Obuchowski is an Airflow committer and an expert in data lineage and observability integration. Currently a Senior Software Engineer at Datadog, Maciej has been working on merging OpenLineage capabilities into Apache Airflow.

He led the effort for Airflow’s native OpenLineage support (AIP-62), enabling automatic capture of pipeline metadata, which landed in Airflow 2.7+. Maciej’s contributions ensure Airflow users can easily track data flow for compliance and debugging. Beyond lineage, he’s fixed complex issues in Airflow’s core and providers (often around idempotency and AWS integration) and is an active voice on Airflow’s dev list. He has spoken at Airflow Summit and Datadog’s Dash conference about end-to-end pipeline observability.

Amogh Desai

Amogh Desai - Best Apache Airflow Experts – 19 Ready to Help

Nationality: Indian

Amogh Desai is a rising star in the Airflow community, recently becoming a committer (in late 2023) after a rapid ascent through impactful contributions. As a Senior Software Engineer at Astronomer working on Airflow’s core engineering, Amogh contributed heavily to Airflow 2.6 and 2.7 – notably enhancing the developer experience with the Breeze dev tool and refactoring parts of the scheduler.

His journey from submitting a small docs fix to becoming a committer within a year was featured on Astronomer’s podcast, inspiring new contributors. Amogh also worked on Airflow’s upcoming Taskflow improvements and security features. Before Astronomer, he built data engineering platforms at Cloudera, giving him strong Kubernetes and Hadoop chops that he now applies to Airflow’s container orchestration features. Amogh is active in community support channels and enjoys mentoring others — he’s proof that passionate open-source work can accelerate one’s career.

Pankaj Koti

Making Airflow accessible means giving developers fast feedback loops, strong defaults, and tools that feel familiar.

Nationality: Indian

Pankaj Koti is a software engineer at Astronomer and an Apache Airflow committer who focuses on improving Airflow’s developer experience and usability. With around five years of hands-on Airflow usage, Pankaj contributed features in Airflow 2.7 such as the ability to test connections via the UI.

He also worked on bug fixes and performance tweaks in the scheduler. Pankaj is active in the Airflow Summit circuit – in 2024, he co-presented a session on “Optimizing Airflow Performance” sharing techniques to tune Airflow for faster DAG processing. Based in India, he strengthens Airflow’s global community by leading local meetups and mentoring interns. At Astronomer, Pankaj also contributes to Astronomer Cosmos, an open-source tool that integrates Airflow with dbt workflows. His open-source passion and practical engineering skills help make Airflow more accessible and efficient for everyone.

Pankaj Singh

Nationality: Indian

Pankaj Singh is a Senior Software Engineer at Astronomer and an Apache Airflow committer who specializes in orchestration frameworks. He works on Airflow’s core as well as Astronomer’s Cosmos project.

Pankaj has a strong background in building and securing data platforms, having previously worked at a data startup (Isima) and a confidential computing firm (Fortanix). In the Airflow project, he’s contributed to enhancing the scheduler’s scalability and the developer tooling. He co-presented a talk at Airflow Summit 2024 on Airflow performance tuning alongside Pankaj Koti, sharing their combined lessons from Astronomer’s largest clients. Pankaj Singh is also active on social media (tweeting as @pankajiam_) and writes about Airflow orchestration patterns. His enthusiasm for open-source and hands-on problem solving helps ensure Airflow meets the needs of modern data engineering teams.

Chao-Han Tsai

Nationality: Taiwanese

Chao-Han Tsai is a software engineer recognized for his contributions to Apache Airflow’s stability and multi-team adoption during his tenure at Lyft. As a committer and PMC member since 2019, Chao-Han worked on Airflow’s SLA (service-level agreement) feature, ensuring workflows could be monitored for timeliness.

At Lyft, he was instrumental in maintaining Airflow at scale, handling dozens of teams and use cases on a central Airflow platform. He also proposed the “Remote DAG Fetcher” (AIP-5) to allow distributed deployment of Airflow DAGs, reflecting his forward-thinking approach to Airflow architecture. Chao-Han later joined Netflix, applying his Airflow expertise to orchestrate complex ETL and ML pipelines in the entertainment domain. Active in the Airflow mailing lists, he often provided guidance on configuration and best practices. With his background in both Silicon Valley (Lyft, Netflix) and open source, he has helped solidify Airflow’s reputation as a reliable orchestration tool for large-scale operations.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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