In short
Derek Troy-West is Co-founder and CEO of Factor House, the company behind Kpow, Flex, and the Factor Platform for Apache Kafka and Flink.
Derek Troy-West is Co-founder and CEO of Factor House, the company behind Kpow for Apache Kafka, Flex for Apache Flink, and the Factor Platform. A lifelong software engineer and long-standing member of the Clojure community, Derek has spent over two decades building distributed systems and streaming platforms for organisations across financial services, retail, and beyond. He founded Factor House in 2019 to give Kafka and Flink teams the tooling they need to ship faster and operate with confidence.
Expertise
Derek's expertise is rooted in the design and delivery of highly available, linearly scalable streaming and distributed systems. He has deep practical knowledge of Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Cassandra, and the broader real-time data ecosystem, accumulated across two decades of hands-on engineering and consulting work. A practitioner and advocate of Clojure, Derek has written extensively on the language, spoken about it at Clojure/Conj, and built much of Factor House's core tooling in it. As CEO, he shapes the product vision for Kpow and Flex, and regularly writes and speaks on topics spanning Kafka operations, stream processing, and data engineering platform design.
Experience
Derek co-founded Factor House in 2019 and leads the company as CEO. Before that, he ran Troy-West, a Melbourne-based consultancy specialising in Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Storm, where Clojure was central to how the team delivered streaming platforms for clients across Australia and New Zealand. He also founded Melbourne Distributed, a meetup community for practitioners working with distributed systems. His profile in the Clojure community extends to conference appearances, including a talk at Clojure/Conj 2019, and a feature on The REPL podcast, one of the community's most recognised shows. Earlier in his career, Derek spent nearly a decade consulting across London's financial services sector, with roles at UBS Investment Bank, Fortis Bank, and Fidelity Investments. He began his career as an internet developer at Telecom New Zealand.
Education
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Auckland
Appearances
- Simplifying Streaming at Scale — Behind the Stream: Flink Forward Conversations, Nov 2025
- Strange Loop Edition: A chat with Derek Troy-West — JUXT Cast, season 4 episode 14, Nov 2022
- Clojure, Kafka, and OPERATR with Derek Troy-West — The REPL, episode 32, Nov 2019
Latest articles
How Airbus uses Apache Flink in production
How Airbus's AirSense unit processes more than 2 billion aircraft-position events a day with Apache Flink, fusing multi-provider ADS-B feeds into real-time global flight tracking.
September 5, 2026How Alibaba uses Apache Flink in production
How Alibaba built Blink, its internal Apache Flink fork, to handle 4 billion records a second during Double 11, then merged its isolation and checkpointing innovations into Apache Flink 1.9 and 1.10.
September 5, 2026How Booking.com uses Apache Flink in production
How Booking.com's Security Platform Services team runs Apache Flink as the engine behind an internal security-as-a-service platform, scaling to more than 250 jobs under Ververica Platform.
September 5, 2026How Lyft uses Apache Flink in production
How Lyft's Streaming Compute and Marketplace teams run Apache Flink for pricing features, fraud detection, and event persistence, including the 2026 migration off a homegrown Kubernetes operator.
September 5, 2026How Netflix uses Apache Flink in production
How Netflix runs more than 30,000 Apache Flink jobs across Keystone, its Data Mesh SQL Processor, and a real-time distributed graph, sourced from its own engineering blog and conference talks.
September 5, 2026How Pinterest uses Apache Flink in production
How Pinterest runs 130+ Apache Flink jobs across eight multitenant YARN clusters for image-similarity detection, experiment analytics, ad-budget enforcement, and CDC ingestion into Iceberg.
September 5, 2026How Uber uses Apache Flink in production
How Uber runs more than 2,000 Apache Flink SQL jobs processing over 4 trillion messages a day, from its early AthenaX SQL platform through to IngestionNext, its Flink-to-Hudi streaming data lake.
September 5, 2026
Product Announcing Kpow Community Edition 🚀
The announcement post for Kpow Community Edition, our free toolkit for Apache Kafka clusters, schema registries, and connect installations. Current terms and downloads are on the product page.
May 22, 2026
Industry Our Java compatibility and evolution strategy
This post outlines our release process and future plans for Java support at Factor House, including how we approach deprecating older versions for diverse customer bases.
January 15, 2026
Product Kpow Custom Serdes and Protobuf v4.31.1
This post explains an update in the version of protobuf libraries used by Kpow, and a possible compatibility impact this update may cause to user defined Custom Serdes.
December 2, 2025A final goodbye to OperatrIO
2025 is a pivotal moment at Factor House, formerly Operatr.IO. We've announced our fundraise and have more to share about our roadmap this year, so it's time to retire the io.operatr artifacts.
November 11, 2025
Industry Beyond Kafka: signals from Current London 2025
At Current London 2025, the shift from Kafka Summit signaled a move toward streaming-first AI, system-level control, and production-ready Flink. Here's what Factor House saw and learned.
October 21, 2025Amazon Corretto 11 Memory Issues
A move to v2 cgroups by several Linux distributions, including Amazon Linux 2022 and RHEL 9, highlights a JVM issue in Amazon Corretto 11 that can cause a container to exit with OOMKilled errors.
October 21, 2025
Company Introducing Factor House 2.0 🚀
Today we introduce Flex for Apache Flink, and announce the Factor Platform, the future of distributed systems engineering.
October 21, 2025
Company Factor House Product VPAT
We first published a VPAT in the release notes of Kpow for Apache Kafka v92.4, with one available in every Kpow release since. We are extending that commitment to all future Factor House releases.
October 21, 2025
Company From Bootstrap to Blackbird: The Future of Factor House
Factor House has closed a $5M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures to accelerate the commercial release of the Factor Platform, ending a five-year bootstrapped journey.
October 21, 2025Kafka 3.2.0: idempotent producer breaking change
Apache Kafka KIP-679 changes the default Producer configuration to enable idempotence by default. This can cause message production to fail after updating to the 3.2.0 kafka-client libraries.
October 21, 2025
Company Our Commitment to Engineers
With our funding announcement and the upcoming Factor Platform launch, some customers are asking what it means for Kpow and Flex. Here's our answer: at Factor House, we're here for engineers.
October 21, 2025
Company Web Accessibility at Factor House
How do skateboards and green suns drive web accessibility at Factor House? Learn why accessible products matter to us, and how we've embedded accessibility into our development process.
October 21, 2025
How-to Manage Kafka Visibility with Multi-Tenancy
This article teaches you how to configure Kpow to restrict visibility of Kafka resources with Multi-Tenancy.
August 16, 2021Run Kpow in Kubernetes with Helm
This article covers running Kpow in Kubernetes using the Kpow Helm Chart. Kpow is the all-in-one toolkit to manage, monitor, and learn about your Kafka resources, packaged for Helm deployment.
June 1, 2021