As Engineering Director at Splunk, Steve leads Observability “Getting Data In”: the top contributor to the CNCF OpenTelemetry project. Previously, he served as a founding member and Head of Product at Omnition; and Global Engineering Manager for log analytics at VMware. Steve’s background includes business strategy, software development, product management, user experience, and operations management. He uses data-driven decision-making, agile development processes, and teamwork to create innovative and sustainable solutions; and is distinctly passionate about open-source software and democratizing data. Steve authors SFlanders.net, a technology-centric weblog, and presents regularly at international conferences including KubeCon and Google Cloud Next.