Across all industries there are pioneers. Those that have led the way and broken ground where others have feared to tread. The cloud industry is no different.
People from all walks of life have embraced the technology as a way to re-imagine how business and life is.
While cloud computing has now proven itself as a core piece of technology for many businesses around the world, the reality is that the industry is still very much in its early years.
There’s still debates over its security, ease of use, value, and a whole myriad of other issues. But while these are slowly overcome, there have been many that have embraced it.
Included in this list are some of the ground breakers, trend setters, and most influential people that work in the cloud industry.
They fulfill many different roles, with a wide ranging set of job titles, responsibilities and achievements, but one thing they all have in common is that they are one of the top people in cloud.
These are the people that CBR and many in the industry consider to be the top people under 30 in cloud.
Jessica McKellar
McKellar has an extremely impressive resume, from an education at MIT, an internship as a Software Engineer at Intel, to an Engineering Manager at Oracle and Director of Engineering at Dropbox, after the company she founded (Zulip) was acquired by the company. 
McKellar is a start-up founder, software engineer and open source developer.
McKellar writes on her blog: “I enjoy the Internet, networking, low-level systems engineering, relational databases, tinkering on electronics projects, and contributing to and helping other people contribute to open source software.”
In addition to being a fantastic contributor to the technology community, McKellar is also a technical consultant for the popular HBO show Silicon Valley, was the Director for the Python Software Foundation, the 501c3 non-profit that stewards the Python programming language and community.
Jessica can be found Tweeting @jessicamckellar and on Github here.
Oliver Beattie, Head of Engineering, Monzo
Oliver is the Head of Engineering for Monzo Bank, where he built an architecture that is in stark contrast to traditional banking architectures. The systems at Monzo including core banking systems are built in-house, in a distributed microservices style, all running
on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its backend is fully-distributed, heavily using
Kubernetes and Cassandra, and Monzo Bank has built upwards of 200 services.
Oliver is very active on Twitter, with more than 14,000 tweets and 2,000 followers, and can be found tweeting about Monzo, technology and everyday experiences. Oliver has spoken at numerous conferences in the past year, including Kubecon Seattle and Berlin. He will also be speaking at CoreOS Fest in San Francisco in a few weeks.
Blog by Oliver about Monzo’s backend technology: Building a modern bank backend
Oliver can be found Tweeting @obeattie and the company @monzo
Raphael Arar, Designer & Researcher, IBM
In addition to being an award-winning artist with artworks shown at Gamble House Museum, Boston Cyberarts Gallery and more, Arar has worked with the likes of Apple, Google, The Smithsonian and Children’s Hospital. 
Currently he works as a designer and researcher at IBM Research and Adjunct Faculty at San Jose State University in its Digital Media Art Program.
Arar was previously the Lead UX Designer for the Apple + IBM Partnership.
The now 30 year old, fled the former Soviet Union and Egypt to escape religious persecution, immigrating to Ohio in the US.
Arar has played an important role in one of the most valuable elements of cloud technology – helping to make the user interface and user experience top notch.
Raphael Arar can be found Tweeting @rarar
Max Bennet, Cofounder, Bluecore
As cofounder of Bluecore, a company that aims to make customer behaviour easier to 
understand and actionable, Bennet takes up the role of head of product management
and design.
Bluecore has become one of New York City’s fastest growing start-ups in just four years, having been founded in 2013. The SaaS company can already boast a list of more than 300 retailers that use its product. On that list are the likes of Nike and Gap.
As a sign of its strength, the start-up has already raised around $28m from investors.
Bennett can be found Tweeting @maxsbennett and Bluecore @Bluecore.
Helena Horsburgh, Partner Manager, Dropbox
Helena works at Dropbox where she risen to become Partner Manager.
The former Catz student started out as an SMB Inbound Account Executive before quickly rising through the ranks to become Partner Account Manager in 2016. 
Helena was a founding member of the SMB team in EMEA, and built the company’s sales processes in the region from scratch. In the time she has been there Helena has developed their services for small and medium businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, helping them to collaborate effectively and drive more revenue as a result.
In 2016 Helena was a finalist as one of the rising stars of the year in the Women in IT Awards and again in the 2017 awards.
Helena can be found Tweeting @HelenaHorsburgh and Dropbox @Dropbox
Scott Britton, Cofounder, Troops.AI
Cofounder of Troops.AI, alongside Dan Reich, and Greg Ratner, Britton works at the focusing on sales and growth for the technology that’s billed as “a Slackbot for Sales Teams.”
The company aims to solve an age old problem of software, that it has been trying to get people to adapt to it, rather than the software adapting to the people. 
Basically, the company has set about making CRM data easy to use. It lets users push and pull data in and out of Slack so that it essentially becomes a sales hub.
The idea is that people are using messaging apps by the millions, so why not provide these workers with an artificially intelligent system that will help them perform CRM functions in the tools they are already using.
It’s a big market to go after and a tricky one to succeed in, particularly with Salesforce being such a success. But the New York based start-up has already raised over $9.6 million and it’s only been going since 2015.
Scott can be found Tweeting @britton and the company @Troops.
Vanessa Hurst, founder and CEO CodeMontage
In addition to being the founder and CEO of CodeMontage, Hurst is also the founder of Developers for Good, and co-founder for Girl Develop It and WriteSpeakCode.
CodeMontage connects computer programmers with social-good projects that need volunteer coders, while Developers for Good also aims to assist with various non-profit projects. 
Through her work at CodeMontage, Hurst and the team have developed software such as Quill, the interactive grammar program helps teachers to assess the abilities of students and helps to provide personalised lessons based on the findings.
Her work around women in tech has also seen Hurst co-found Girl Develop It, a non-profit that’s been set up for both women and men to learn about software development.
Hurst is now also the Director of the engineering practice at Etsy.
Hurst can be found Tweeting @DBNess and Girl Develop It @girldevelopit.
Paul Clements, Senior Account Executive, SAP
SAP’s Senior Account Executive Paul Clements may have only been with SAP for six years, but he plays a significant role in partnering with our most complex and strategic retail customers including Kingfisher plc and Wilko retail, to help transform their business in the Cloud. Paul’s first taste of Cloud was through the SAP Sales Academy, 
where he was ranked first globally, out of over 300 other graduates, for his outstanding performance in customer sales.
Now at just 27-years-old, Paul has stepped up to become a trusted key strategic partner and technology advisor in this fast-paced industry. Alongside his current role, Paul has become a true ambassador for Cloud, volunteering as a mentor to the SAP Sales Academy trainees in his spare time to develop their skills in Cloud transformation. The company is said to see Paul moving quickly to fulfill his career goals of taking on more people leadership responsibilities, increasing diversity and leveraging the Cloud for customer transformation and success.
Paul can be found Tweeting @PaulFJClements.
Hiroki Takeuchi, GoCardless
Founder and CEO of GoCardless, Hiroki Takeuchi just sneaks into the 30 and under bracket by a matter of days, but that should detract from his achievements.
Founded with Matt Robinson, GoCardless uses smart technology to help businesses to accept and process direct debit payments.
In essence, the company has been helping to solve a problem related to SaaS companies, which is getting paid on a recurring basis.
GoCardless has devised a way to get paid via bank-to-bank online payments, and it has already expanded to France.
The company has already raised over $24.8 million and counts the likes of TripAdvisor, Box, and the Financial Times as clients.
Takeuchi can be found Tweeting @hirokitakeuchi and the company @gocardless.
Leigh Schvartz, Senior Consultant, Global Solutions Marketing, Avanade
Leigh is a senior consultant within Avanade’s global marketing team, responsible for providing marketing support for Avanade’s cloud business. In between work commitments, Leigh is a keen athlete and represents Team GB for his age group in the sport of Duathlon. 
Leigh’s interest in the cloud began in 2010 during his time at Loughborough University whilst studying Management Sciences, choosing to write his final year report on the various trade-offs companies make when using a public cloud service. The report, titled ‘Is Heaven Really in the Cloud’, was awarded a first, with 90%.
During University Leigh completed a year’s placement at Fujitsu and was then invited back to join their graduate scheme. Leigh had a number of roles at Fujitsu including providing product marketing support for Fujitsu’s cloud infrastructure solutions and private cloud integrated systems, helping both clients and managed service providers build private cloud solutions. Upon completion of the graduate scheme in 2014, Leigh was awarded “Graduate of the Year” for the 2012 intake.
Key aspects of Schvartz’s role include working closely with Avanade’s cloud leadership in authoring regular market intelligence stories and designing global campaigns which support the company’s vision.
Schvartz can be found Tweeting @leighschvartz
Madeleine ‘Bear’ Douglas, Slack
Douglas recently made the news when she made the move away from Twitter to head up Slack’s developer advocacy group.
Douglas has been at Facebook, Twitter and now Slack, clearly her expertise in building relationships with developers is in high demand.
The move to Slack highlights the company’s growing reach into the enterprise, something that Douglas will clearly play an important part of.
Douglas works with third-party developers with the idea of encouraging them to build on top of Slack’s tech, and there’s already around six million apps integrated with it.
Douglas tends to go by the name Bear, a nickname that her parents gave her.
Douglas can be found Tweeting @beardigsit and the company @SlackHQ .
Andrew First, Cofounder, Leanplum
The former Google software engineer, Andrew First is the CTO and Co-founder of 
Leanplum, a company that aims to make experiences on mobile more personal by optimising user experience and through targeted messages.
The Duke University graduate has helped to grow Leanplum from its launch in 2012 to over 100 employees and over $46m in funding (as of 2016).
In 2016 the founders of the company reimagined Leanplum as a mobile marketing cloud that offers everything that a client would need to be able to retain their users after an app has been downloaded.
A bumped Series C of $29m shows this start-up to be a popular choice among investors.
First can be found Tweeting @afirst
Cecilia Stallsmith, senior manager, platform and partner marketing, Slack
A former employee of Box, Stallsmith is now at Slack as a senior manager of platform and partner marketing. 
Having joined Slack in 2015, Stallsmith has played an important role in the start-ups progression to becoming one of the leading collaboration platforms in the market.
The role she plays is an important one, helping to bring customers, developers, and partners on to the platform, including the likes of Salesforce and Google.
The Standford University graduate moved into the tech industry after being inspired by Box CEO Aaron Levie speaking in one of her classes. Stallsmith reportedly got a job at Box after emailing Levie to ask for an internship.
Stallsmith can be found Tweeting @CeciStalls and the company @SlackHQ.
Andrea Pfundmeier, Cofounder, Boxcryptor
The co-founder of Boxcryptor with Robert Freudenreich, Pfundmeier has helped to grow the company to a team of 26 that can boast customers in over 190 countries. 
The company specialises in encryption software for cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and many more.
Serving as CEO of Boxcryptor, Pfundmeier is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Digital Start-up Economy of the German Federal Ministry of Economics.
Pfundmeier is an expert in data protection and is helping to make the cloud secure for all to use.
Pfundmeier can be found Tweeting @A_Pfund and the company @Boxcryptor.
Nick D’Aloisio
At just 21, D’Aloisio is one of the youngest on this list but has already proven himself to be one of the great tech entrepreneurs.
In his teenage years he invented Summly, an automatic summarization algorithm, basically it solved issues related to the way that news articles were presented on 
smartphones. The initial version was downloaded by over 200,000 users and a year after its launch he received $1m in venture funding.
In 2013, long before he turned 20, he sold Summly for a reported £30m to Yahoo.
In 2015 he left Yahoo to focus on his studies at Oxford and he is now said to be working on his next project.
According to his LinkedIn page this next project is in stealth but has already raised over $3.5m and has a team of 12 in London. There’s certainly a bright future ahead of D’Aloisio and he’s already had an academic paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Psychology (Routledge).
D’Aloisio can be found Tweeting @nickdaloisio.
Who else is on the list?
Scott Gassmann, Accenture
Scott is a manager within Accenture’s UK Salesforce practice and leads the company’s Service Cloud practice. Scott is currently on shared parental leave following the birth of his first child, but prior to leaving, he worked across multiple industries, including Life Sciences, where he helped optimise cloud infrastructure for medical research.
Scott is very active in the Salesforce ecosystem and is hoping to be named as a Salesforce MVP this year. You may have seen him at the French Touch Dreamin conference talking about lightning files connect for document repository connection. You’ll also spot him in the Salesforce Trailhead zone at the Salesforce world tour, as well as smaller developer meet ups, where he plays an active role.
He is currently a key part of the organisation team for SurfForce 2017 “a Salesforce community event with a twist” which brings together the Salesforce community in an unusual way with a big focus on charity. See here for further information.
Scott can be found Tweeting @scottgassmann.
George Spencer, CEO, Rentify
The CEO and founder of SaaS platform Rentify, George Spencer has set about 
revolutionising the way that landlords manage, market, and make money from their
properties.
The 29 year old has helped build a company that provides numerous tools for landlords and it makes money by taking a cut of a properties rent, in return for managing everything around it.
The company formally launched in 2012 and has raised over $16 million with the backing of the likes of Balderton Capital.
Spencer can be found Tweeting @probablygeorge and the company @Rentify.
Rebecca Garcia, Squarespace and Cofounder CoderDojo NYC
Named as one of Glamour’s 35 women under 35 who are changing the tech industry, Garcia has already made a big name for herself at just 23. 
The developer evangelist at Squarespace, and co-founder of CoderDojo in NYC, is said to spend her time coding, working on community development and education during the week, while the weekend is for CoderDojo.
CoderDojo is an international non-profit organisation and Garcia helped to found the NYC chapter. Garcia runs workshops with around 100 young people a month and helps to teach them things like app development, game development and developing for the web.
Garcia also recently became the youngest ever person to receive the White House Champion of Charge Award for Tech Inclusion.
Rebecca can be found Tweeting @geekgirlweb
Ghada Fourane, Accenture
Ghada is a Senior Consultant in Accenture’s Salesforce UK practice. She is the company’s lead female developer in the under 30s age group and is on the way to achieving Certified Technical Architect (CTA) status. 
She has worked on and led multiple projects across industry recently working at clients as diverse as a nuclear power station, the UK’s electricity transmission network and an organisation who license music to commercial properties.
She is not only an expert on Salesforce itself, but also many associated technologies such as FinancialForce, SpringCM and SteelBrick. She is a fantastic role model for younger female developers and will be a key member of the Accenture team over the coming years.
Ghada can be found Tweeting @Fourane.
Rob Bishop, Magic Pony
Magic Pony hit the headlines last year after Twitter paid $150m for the London AI start-up that Bishop helped to co-found.
The graduate of Imperial College London helped to create a machine learning company 
that makes high quality videos from grainy footage. Twitter plans to use the technology to enhance its live and video offerings.
The company’s patented technology is particularly good at enhancing image quality when it comes to video from mobile phones in poor lighting conditions, it’s also able to make pixelated images sharper.
In 2015 Bishop was named as one of the Financial Times Top 10 Technology
Entrepreneurs Under 30 and in 2016 he made it on to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Europe.
In addition to Magic Pony, Bishop also co-founded Intelligent Spatial Positioning and he was also a software engineer and evangelist for the Raspberry Pi Foundation after he was their first engineering employee in 2012.
Bishop can be found Tweeting @Rob_Bishop.
Guy Levin
The former executive director for The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), Levin has been on the front lines when it comes to getting the UK Government to create 
policies that will help the UK’s tech sector.
The former government adviser, Levin worked to bridge the gap between start-ups and the government and has put pressure on the government to rethink things like immigration policies and has helped to lead delegations of start-up founders to Brussels.
Now working at Uber as a public policy senior analyst, he works with academics to collaborate on research and works on topics such as the future of urban mobility and regulatory reform.
Guy can be found Tweeting @guy_levin and the company @Uber.
Michael Grinich (28) Christine Spang, Nylas
Grinich and Spang, both 28, are the founders of Nylas, a platform built for app developers that’s focused on handling emails and protocols and takes care of the underlying infrastructure.
What this means is that the developers are able to focus on doing things like making their apps unique with excellent features, rather than spending a lot of their time dealing with the infrastructure.
Spang wrong the core mail synchronization engine and operates as CTO, while Grinich operates as CTO and wrote his thesis on the fundamental tools for syncing email while he was studying at MIT.
Grinich can be found Tweeting @grinich, Spang @spang and the company @nylas.
James Routley, Cloudreach
Routley is a systems developer at Cloudreach and is also the Head of Open Source. 
Recently, he has been the lead developer on the Sceptre project, alongside his day-to-day solutions architecture work.
Sceptre is a tool for automating and managing AWS CloudFormation infrastructure. It has recently been open sourced and the project and source code can be found on GitHub. James and his team designed Sceptre to make cloud deployments easier, faster and safer for both Cloudreach and the wider community.
Additionally, James built Ptolemy, a tool for writing simple AWS DMS mapping tables. He is the head of open source at Cloudreach, and has helped define company policies for publishing code to give back to the community. James has recently accepted an offer to study at the Recurse Center, and will be moving to New York to improve his coding.
Routley can be found Tweeting @james_routley the company @Cloudreach
Eric Duffy, Pathgather
The co-founder of Pathgather, Duffy has helped to create a platform that serves an extremely important function in the tech industry. 
The idea of Pathgather is to help companies to educate their workforce while they are on the job, an important job when considering the growing skills gap that is impacted businesses across the world.
The company’s social network software gives bosses the tools to manage in-house education and to reward them when new skills are acquired.
The CEO of the company can already boast some of the biggest names in the industry as customers, with the likes of Twitter, Qualcomm and Walmart.
Duffy can be found Tweeting @dufstar and the company @Pathgather.
Adi Zellner, Wix.com
The head of mobile at Wix.com, Zellner has previously held the roles of Head of Product of Wix Hotels, which was the sites first fully integrated and verticalised industry 
solution for the areas of hotels, B&B, and holiday renters.
Zellner, a graduate of Ben Gurion University, was also the co-founder and CTO of Roomer, a company that focused on the travel exchange marketplace. She has also held a position at Magshimim in cyber education, which focuses on nurturing young talent in Israel.
In addition to these roles, Zellner also lead an R&D team in an elite Israeli technology unit that consults with companies in the defence and security industry as well as data mining research for e-learning systems.
Zellner doesn’t have a Twitter account but can be found on LinkedIn here.
Lynn Root, Spotify
Root started off her enterprise tech career at Red Hat in 2012 as an Associate Software Engineer before moving on to Spotify as first a Partner Engineer and then a Backend Engineer and now a Site Reliability Engineer. 
Root’s jobs are vital to the reliability to one of the most popular apps, Spotify.
In addition to her role at Spotify, Root is the founder of the San Francisco Chapter of PyLadies, which is an international mentorship group that focuses on helping more women to become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community.
Root has also held roles as the vice chair and board member of the Python Software Foundation and has been a member of the Django Software Foundation.
The 28 year old is an active contributor on GitHub, which can be found here.
Root can be found Tweeting @roguelynn, the company @Spotify, and for PyLadies @PyLadies.
James Hall, Parallax
Hall has already amassed over a decade in the digital sector, is the author of the 
popular jsPDF library, and is also the founder and director of Parallax.
Parallax is a digital agency that recently built an online recording studio for David Guetta and UEFA that used Serverless computing technology from Amazon Web Services.
Hall also helped to run AWS Meetups in Leeds, and helps companies around the world to build their businesses online, in addition to contributing and promoting the Serverless Framework.
Hall can be found Tweeting @MrRio
James Gill, GoSquared
Gill, who is the co-founder and CEO of GoSquared, which offers real-time user-level 
analytics for sites and apps, has been working on the company for over 10 years, which means that he was starting it when he was just 15.
Gill says that the majority of his experience lies in design and creation and his CV makes for interesting reading.
A graduate of the University of Exeter, Gill did two months’ work experience and the rest of his experience is with GoSquared. Far from being a criticism, it highlights the impressiveness of Gill’s achievements with GoSquared.
Gill can be found Tweeting @jamesjgill, the company @GoSquared.
Geoff Wagstaff, GoSquared
Geoff is the CTO and co-founder of GoSquared and is dubbed the master of AWS at the 
business as he looks after all the back-end services under the hood of the company.
Like his boss and fellow co-founder, James Gill, Wagstaff went from university straight into GoSquared. However, Wagstaff follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest innovators throughout history by having not finished university.
Wagstaff was attending the University of Nottingham but left his electronic and computer engineering course in order to focus on the GoSquared business – a move that has clearly worked out for him.
Wagstaff can be found Tweeting @TheDeveloper.
Jessica Scorpio, Founder, Getaround
Scorpio is the founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Getaround, an innovative start-up that’s allows drivers to rent cars from private owners, and for the owners to rent them 
out for payment.
The company launched in 2011, after being founded in 2009, and has just raised $45m from Toyota, among others, in its Series C funding round.
The peer-to-peer rental model means that the company doesn’t own its own vehicles.
In addition to Getaround, Scorpio previously founded IDEAL, a not-for-profit network for entrepreneurs and young leaders.
The Canadian was picked in 2011 by the Huffington Post as one of the top female technology founders to watch and she was also chosen by Fortune Magazine as one of the top female entrepreneurs under the age of 25, as well as being one of the Forbes 30 Under 30.
Scorpio can be found Tweeting @jessicascorpio and the company @Getaround
The people on this list have not been ranked from in order, but have all been selected as the top talent in the cloud industry.
