Akela Drissner leads solutions engineering at dltHub, the company building open source tooling for data ingestion. In that role she works closely with teams adopting dlt, helping them turn raw, messy sources into reliable, well-structured pipelines so that data actually arrives where it is needed and ready to use.

Her path into data tooling runs through machine learning. Akela has a background in ML with a focus on natural language processing, and she previously worked in conversational AI at Rasa, an experience that shaped how she thinks about building practical, applied systems rather than demos. That combination of ML depth and customer-facing engineering work now informs her mission of making open source data engineering simpler for everyone, from solo analysts to large data teams.