CTO @ Clouds on Mars
Dr. Estera Kot is the Chief Technology Officer at Clouds On Mars, where she drives the company’s innovation in Data & AI strategy and execution. A former Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, she played a key role in building performance-critical components of Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft Fabric, focusing on Apache Spark and high-efficiency analytical engines. Estera is a Polish-born engineer by passion, fluent in several programming languages and recognized for her hands-on technical depth. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science with distinction, specializing in machine and deep learning for medical imaging. Her research has led to numerous scientific publications and a U.S. patent in big data processing. Her career spans global tech leaders like Intel, Sony, and Procter & Gamble. She is a respected educator and mentor, having designed full-time and postgraduate AI-in-Cloud programs at the Warsaw University of Technology. Her students now work at CERN, Google, Meta, and other top-tier institutions worldwide. Estera is a guest lecturer at UCLA—one of the top public research universities in the U.S.—and Łazarski University in Warsaw. As a speaker, she’s presented at top industry events including MLADS (Microsoft’s internal AI and data science conference in Redmond), the inaugural FabCon in Las Vegas, and several AI and cloud conferences across Europe. She also produces educational content on YouTube, making complex AI topics accessible and practical. Estera is committed to building scalable, ethical, and real-world-driven AI solutions, with a focus on impact over hype.