Edward Jay Kreps

Edward Jay “Jay” Kreps is the co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Confluent [CFLT] — a company that builds tools and platforms around real-time data streaming. Under his leadership, Confluent has emerged as a leading player in the data streaming space, building on his early work as an architect of large-scale data infrastructure. Kreps is credited with co-creating the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka during his time at LinkedIn, which became foundational for Confluent’s data-streaming products. As of 2025, he remains a major owner and key executive of the company.