Technical Talks

Serhii Sokolenko

Co-Founder & CEO | Tower

Brad Heller

Co-Founder & CTO | Tower

AI Launchpad 2025: Tower

Serhii Sokolenko and Brad Heller share insights from Tower's elegant 2-layer data stack where all compute engines coexist harmoniously, exploring how to run Python frameworks from ETL to inference on scalable single-node compute with Iceberg open storage. These Snowflake alumni and Big Tech veterans offer valuable perspectives on building simple yet powerful architectures that enable seamless collaboration between different processing engines without complexity overhead.

Co-Founder & CEO

Serhii Sokolenko

Tower

Serhii Sokolenko is the CEO and co-founder of Tower.dev, a platform for Data + AI apps that run on open Iceberg storage and play nicely with other engines. Before founding Tower, Serhii worked at Databricks in the Unity Catalog compute group, at Snowflake on a high-concurrency, low-latency version of the data warehouse, and at Google Cloud Dataflow, building a unified batch and streaming data platform. His first startup was about opinion and emotion identification in natural text, and his second startup introduced NLP to LegalTech.

Co-Founder & CTO

Brad Heller

Tower

Brad Heller is the CTO and co-founder of Tower.dev, a next generation data platform for Data + AI apps that use Iceberg storage. Tower.dev is a platform as a service that solves infrastructure problems for data engineering teams. Prior to founding Tower.dev, Brad worked on the control plane at Snowflake. Brad is located in Berlin, Germany, but was born and raised on the west coast of the US.