Founder Profile
Jun Rao
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Jun Rao?
Jun Rao is a founder of Confluent, which was founded in 2014 with Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede.
- Company founded
- Confluent
- Founded
- 2014
- Co-founders
- Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede
Founding Story
Jun Rao co-founded Confluent in 2014. Before Confluent, Rao was a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn working on real-time distributed data systems and a co-creator of Apache Kafka. Earlier in his career, he spent over six years as a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center, conducting pioneering research on database engines and query optimization. Rao holds a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.
Sources
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