Olena Kutsenko

Senior Developer Advocate, Aiven

Based in Berlin, Germany

Olena is an expert in data, sustainable software development, and teamwork. With a background in software engineering, she's led teams and developed mission-critical applications at Nokia, HERE Technologies, and AWS. Currently, she works at Aiven where she supports developers and customers in using open-source data technologies such as Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, and OpenSearch. She is also an international public speaker and regularly presents at conferences around the world. She holds AWS Developer and Solutions Architect certifications, and is also a Confluent Catalyst.

Superpowers

NodeJS
JavaScript
TypeScript
Apache Kafka
ClickHouse
OpenSearch

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Speaking activities

Upcoming

Big Data CONFERENCE Europe 2024
Sentiment Analysis in Action: Building Your Real-time Pipeline
Monitoring and interpreting the sentiment of data records is important for a variety of use cases. However, traditional human-based methods fall short in handling huge volumes of information with the required speed and efficiency. AI, however, can address this challenge....
Nov 20, 2024 - Nov 22, 2024
07:00 - 17:00 UTC
Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania
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NDC London
A deep dive into vector search technology and tools
The underlying idea is quite straightforward. For example, let's take a movie recommendation system. The idea is first to represent each movie in our catalog as a vector, a numerical representation of a piece of text. Next we also convert the search phrase into a vector. Having done that we enter a whole new realm — a multidimensional space where these vectors replace the original text values. Now through some mathematical techniques, we can determine which movie representations are closest to each other and to our search phrase!
But how do we create such vector representations? We need an AI model trained on vast amounts of data to recognize patterns and effectively convert text phrases into vectors. We also need proper tools to run the model and do the inferences.
All of this and more you’ll learn in this session. We'll try out different data solutions - ClickHouse, OpenSearch, PGVector and others. We'll also explore different models that are available depending on your language preference and programming skills. Or, if you don’t want to run the model locally, what APIs you can use to do the inference for free.
Plenty of demos and a bit of coding for each of the options. This session will be useful for anyone who is intrigued by contextual search and usage of AI, but might find themselves overwhelmed by the complexities to get started.
Jan 27, 2025 - Jan 31, 2025
14:00 - 14:00 UTC
London, United Kingdom
Join
NDC London
Building long-term memory in agent systems with open source tools
We'll demonstrate how to build a communication process using Valkey for pub/sub messaging to maintain agent independence and Apache Kafka as a temporary storage for short-term memory. Once the ongoing conversation has ended, agents enter a reflection mode where fresh data is processed using Apache Flink, vectorized, and stored in OpenSearch for future use as long-term memory.
We’ll combine short-term and long-term memories using the Retrieval-Augmented Generation pattern for subsequent conversations, so that our agent system can remember and learn from every interaction.
This setup is particularly relevant in scenarios like automating customer support, managing IoT devices, or any situation where systems need to operate independently while maintaining common state and being in sync in real-time.
Jan 27, 2025 - Jan 31, 2025
14:00 - 14:00 UTC
London, United Kingdom
Join

Past

All things open
A deep dive into vector search technology and tools
It’s fascinating how vector search boosted the usage of contextual search across numerous applications.
The underlying idea is quite straightforward. For example, let’s take a movie recommendation system. The idea is first to represent each movie in our catalog as a vector, a numerical representation of a piece of text....
Oct 27, 2024 - Oct 29, 2024
2024 All Day DevOps
A deep dive into vector search technology and tools
It's fascinating how vector search boosted the usage of contextual search across numerous applications.

The underlying idea is quite straightforward. For example, let's take a movie recommendation system. The idea is first to represent each movie in our catalog as a vector, a numerical representation of a piece of text...
Oct 9, 2024 - Oct 10, 2024
Devoxx Morocco
A deep dive into vector search technology and tools
It's fascinating how vector search boosted the usage of contextual search across numerous applications.
The underlying idea is quite straightforward. For example, let's take a movie recommendation system. The idea is first to represent each movie in our catalog as a vector, a numerical representation of a piece of text....
Oct 2, 2024 - Oct 4, 2024
Current 2024
Mastering Kafka consumer distribution: a guide to efficient scaling and resource optimization
For this session, Olena Kutsenko and Olena Babenko (Staff Engineer at Aiven) join forces.
Sep 17, 2024 - Sep 18, 2024
JavaZone
Contextual search with vector search: exploring your options with open source tools
It's fascinating how vector search boosted the usage of contextual search across numerous applications. The underlying idea is quite straightforward. For example, let's take a movie recommendation system....
Sep 4, 2024 - Sep 5, 2024
NDC Oslo 2024
Building a movie recommendation system with TensorFlow and pgvector
Come build a movie recommendation system from start to finish, utilizing NodeJS, TensorFlow, and PostgreSQL’s extension pgvector.
- Find the workshop materials on Aiven Labs
Jun 10, 2024 - Jun 14, 2024
Devoxx UK
Sentiment analytics in action: building your real-time pipeline
Together in this session we'll build a system using open source technologies Apache Kafka and Apache Flink with AI models to get real-time sentiment from social media data.
May 8, 2024 - May 10, 2024
Kafka Summit
Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions
If you are new to Apache Kafka, or you're looking for good practices to design your partitions and avoid common pitfalls, you'll find this session useful!
May 2, 2024
Kafka Summit London
Mastering Kafka consumer distribution: a guide to efficient scaling and resource optimization
For this session, Olena Kutsenko and Olena Babenko (Staff Engineer at Aiven) join forces.
Mar 19, 2024 - Mar 20, 2024
NDC London 2024
Building a movie recommendation system with Tensorflow and PGVector
Come build a movie recommendation system from start to finish, utilizing NodeJS, TensorFlow, and PostgreSQL’s extension PGVector.
- Find the workshop materials on Aiven Labs
Jan 29, 2024 - Feb 2, 2024
Singapore OSDI
Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions
At the heart of Apache Kafka is a set of brokers that contain topics. Topics are split into partitions. If you're fresh to Apache Kafka, or looking for good practices to design your partitions and avoid common pitfalls, you'll find this session useful!
Nov 16, 2023
Devoxx Belgium
Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions
If you are fresh to Apache Kafka, or you're looking for good practices to design your topic partitions and avoid common pitfalls, you'll find this session useful!
Watch the recording here if you missed the talk.
Oct 2, 2023 - Oct 6, 2023
Devoxx Ukraine
ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database
If your challenge is analysing terabytes of data - this talk is for you. If you're a data scientist looking for tools to work with big data - this talk is for you. And, of course, if you are just curious about what makes ClickHouse crazy fast - this talk is for you as well.
Sep 22, 2023
AWS Community Day
Using OpenSearch and Apache Kafka to explore Mastodon
This talk is for both beginners and intermediate users. We'll use some more advanced concepts and a bit of TypeScript code, but will keep it all simple, so that everyone can follow along and experiment with Mastodon data!
Sep 14, 2023
Javazone
ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database
If your challenge is analysing terabytes of data - this talk is for you. If you're a data scientist looking for tools to work with big data - this talk is for you. And, of course, if you are just curious about what makes ClickHouse crazy fast - this talk is for you as well. You can now watch it here.

Sep 6, 2023 - Sep 7, 2023
Berlin Buzzwords
ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database
Columnar databases seem to be full of mysteries and confusion. In this introduction for ClickHouse, we'll take apart its building blocks to see how it achieves its remarkable performance.
Jun 18, 2023 - Jun 20, 2023
JSNation
Apache Kafka simply explained with TypeScript examples
This session is for curious minds, who might have never worked with distributed streaming systems before, or are beginners to event streaming applications. Find the recording here.
Jun 1, 2023
OSDI Amsterdam
What is behind the fastest columnar database
Talk about ClickHouse.
- Link to slides
May 30, 2023
Kafka Summit London
The Dark and Dirty Side of Fixing Uneven Partitions
Talk with Olena Babenko, Staff Engineer at Aiven, on what to do when the data distribution across topic partitions is badly broken and as a result significantly hurts consuming applications performances, increasing lag and slowing data processing.
- Slides and recording
May 16, 2023 - May 17, 2023
Devoxx UK
Using Apache Kafka and OpenSearch to explore Mastodon
This talk is for both beginners in Apache Kafka and intermediate users. It talks about bringing data from Mastodon to Kafka using TypeScript and a couple of helpful libraries.
- Recording
May 10, 2023 - May 12, 2023
Uptime 2022
ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database. Or how to make it click!
Get the most of ClickHouse and avoid pitfalls. We talk about analytics, columnar databases and sparse indexing. We look at the most puzzling concepts of ClickHouse, so that by the end you find them not only logical, but maybe even fascinating.
- Recording
Sep 14, 2022 - Sep 15, 2022

Blogs by Olena Kutsenko

Oct 14, 2022
What is 'Current' with data streaming?
Current 2022 was this year's successor to the Kafka Summit series of conferences. Read on to find out what our Aiven colleagues thought of this new event (hint: it was very good!).
Francesco & Ben & Olena & Markos
Sep 14, 2022
What is ClickHouse®?
Big data can help you reach complex business decisions. Find out how ClickHouse is designed to get to the bottom of big data processes.
Olena
Jul 5, 2022
Apache Kafka® simply explained
Learning Apache Kafka doesn’t have to be difficult. Read on to get a friendly explanation of the Apache Kafka fundamentals.
Olena