Champions of Data + AI

From 2014 to 2020, Chris was responsible for leading Capital One’s enterprise data transformation initiative. Chris managed a 1,000 person data engineering team with a budget of $120 million-plus to develop cloud-native solutions and platforms for streaming data, data lake, on-demand compute, data warehouse, data management, data governance, business intelligence and machine learning. He was also responsible for migrating Capital One from on-prem versions of Teradata, SAS, Hadoop and Ab Initio to the new AWS-based Modern Cloud Data Architecture leveraging Databricks and Snowflake for various workloads.

Prior to Capital One, Chris founded, led and successfully exited a software company after serving as its president and CEO from 2002 through 2014. He served as an adjunct professor at George Mason University and the University of Virginia and is a frequent presenter at major technology conferences. Chris holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.

Alex leads the dedicated sales team for financial services at Databricks. Before her career in big data, Alex led Americas sales and accounts for the collaboration software company, Symphony Communication. Prior to that, Alex was in finance, spending 15-plus years in equity advisory, capital markets and corporate banking at Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered. Alex holds a bachelor’s degree in Japanese and management from Durham University in the UK.