Khawaja Shams is a long-time QCon advocate and distributed systems engineer. He received the NASA Early Career Medal for his work on the Mars Rovers, contributing from onboard cameras to the image processing pipeline.

At Amazon Web Services, he led DynamoDB and later served as VP of Engineering for AWS Elemental. Today, he is Co Founder and CEO of Momento, a Series A startup focused on high performance data infrastructure, and an active contributor to the Valkey open source ecosystem.