Igor Khrol
Head of Data Engineering at Automattic
I lead the data engineering team at Automattic (WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce), building the self-hosted data platform that powers the company's analytics and AI — Trino, Spark, Airflow, Kafka, and Apache Iceberg, run without SaaS or cloud lock-in. My focus today is AI enablement: giving LLM agents safe, governed access to company data through MCP servers, with evaluation and access controls around them.
My path — a decade leading quality engineering and test automation, then data platforms and ML infrastructure at Toptal and Automattic, now AI enablement — is why the platforms I build are trustworthy: quality is engineered in, not tested in.
Two-time silver medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad (2003, 2004). 20 years in the industry. I write production code daily, mainly in Python and Scala. See my career history and conference talks.