Apache Spark NYC Meetup February 2026
We’re excited to kick off our first Spark meetup of 2026 with an in-person event right here in New York City.
Join us for an evening of practical technical sessions, real-world lessons from the field, and open discussions around how teams are deploying and optimizing Spark in production today.
It’s a great chance to hear from experienced practitioners, exchange ideas, and connect with others building large-scale data platforms.
Whether you’re deep into Spark already or just getting started, this meetup is a great way to start the year with the local Spark community.
🔔 Seats are limited, RSVP soon to secure your spot!
Agenda:
5:30 PM – Mingling, name tags, pizzas & beers
6:00 PM – Meetup begins
• Kickoff, intros, and logistics
•Meni Shmueli - Co-founder & CEO at DataFlint, "Distributed Computing Unpacked."
Distributed computing, especially with Apache Spark, can feel unnecessarily complex. But under the hood, it's a beautiful system of trade-offs. In this talk, we will walk through how distributed engines optimize for speed, fault tolerance, and scalability, and how understanding these mechanics can help you fix real-world performance issues in your Spark jobs.
• Andrzej Neścior - Cloud & Data Platform Engineer at Nielsen, ״Big Data FinOps Applied? ״
Deep dive into building cost-efficient data platforms on AWS. We will discuss best practices for using Savings Plans, handling Spot interruptions on Kubernetes, and automating cost management to maximize ROI for large-scale Spark workloads.
• Lisa Cao - Staff Developer Advocate at Databricks, "Production-Ready Data Engineering Made Simple with Apache Spark’s new Declarative Pipelines."
Apache Spark 4.1 introduces Spark Declarative Pipelines, a new way to build production data pipelines without managing execution logic or dependencies. In this talk, we’ll talk about how experienced and novice Apache Spark developers can leverage declarative pipelining for a better debugging and pipeline orchestration experience.
7:30 PM – Networking and mingling
8:00 PM – Wrap it up