Vikram
Koka

Vikram Koka is Chief Strategy Officer at Astronomer and a member of the Apache Airflow PMC, with a deep passion for data engineering and open-source orchestration. He has been a key contributor to Airflow since 2019, helping lead its evolution from a data orchestration platform into ML and now AI workloads, a journey reflected in both his architectural contributions and the platform's growing community of data, ML, and AI engineers. His design contributions span Airflow's entire modern history: Scheduler High Availability in Airflow 2.0, Data-Driven Scheduling, Dynamic Tasks, Setup/Teardown, and the program management of Airflow 3, the largest release in Airflow's history. He is currently leading Airflow's evolution into AI-native orchestration, introducing Human-in-the-Loop capabilities that allow AI pipelines to incorporate human judgment natively and enabling Airflow's vast connector ecosystem to be leveraged by Agentic workloads. Vikram's open-source roots trace back to his early work on the GNU Debugger (GDB), where he co-developed its remote debugging capabilities. With patents in distributed computing and cryptography, he brings a strong technical foundation alongside extensive experience leading globally distributed engineering and cross-functional teams spanning R&D, UX, product, services, and business development.