Meet the BalticNOG 2026 Program Committee
The BalticNOG 2026 Program Committee is in place and is now reviewing proposals. This is the group that shapes what you will see on stage in Riga on 23–24 September: the talks, the panels, the lightning sessions, and the technical depth that makes a NOG worth attending. They come from IXPs, hyperscalers, vendors, and operators across the Baltics, the Nordics, and beyond.
If you have something to share with the network operator community, the floor is open. The Call for Papers is live at https://balticnog.org/call-for-papers/, and the committee listed below will review every submission.
Ignas Anfalovas, Chair
Ignas is the Senior Engineering Manager of the Platform Team at IPXO, where he oversees cloud infrastructure, network design, and IP address management. His day-to-day work covers RPKI, BGP security, and scalable platform services. As Chair, he leads BalticNOG’s effort to bring operators, engineers, and policymakers across the Baltic region closer together. Away from the keyboard, he is an active Lithuanian folk dancer.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anfalovas/
Marijana Novaković, Co-Chair
Marijana is the CEO of LANX, a company focused on Internet overlay projects for Web3, AI agent infrastructure, and security. Before that, she served as Head of Network Architecture at Syntropy, scaling a decentralized network to thousands of nodes. Earlier in her career, she held network architecture roles at Twilio and LinkedIn, where she helped scale backbone and edge networks, ran global interconnection strategy, and built tools for network performance and security.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peronosphora/
Bijal Sanghani
Bijal brings over 25 years of experience across global Internet infrastructure, working at the intersection of engineering, operations, policy, and strategy. She spent more than 13 years as Managing Director of Euro-IX, where she doubled membership and led global technical and policy collaboration among IXPs. Before Euro-IX, she held engineering and operational leadership roles at DEMON Internet, Level 3, FLAG Telecom, and Reliance Globalcom. She has also served as Co-chair of the RIPE NCC Services Working Group and as a Board Director at PeeringDB.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bsanghani/
Kaj Kjellgren
Kaj is a Senior Peering Consultant at DE-CIX, working on peering and interconnection strategy globally with a particular focus on the Nordics. With more than 25 years in Internet infrastructure, operator networks, and IXP environments, he helps networks, data centers, cloud platforms, and enterprises build resilient connectivity, from architecture and capacity planning through to routing hygiene. He is a long-time contributor to the peering and NOG communities and a regular speaker, panelist, and moderator at conferences worldwide.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kajkjellgren/
Mantas Smelevičius
Mantas has been breaking and fixing things in IT since 1996, when he started out installing Slackware and ircII. Today, he runs and designs the entire infrastructure at TOPsport as a Site Reliability Engineer and System Architect, while also serving as the Lead DevOps Engineer at Wizata, where he tackles challenges in Azure, AWS, IoT, AI, and Python. Before that, he led Unix and Linux teams at the Bank of Lithuania. Almost three decades in, he is still curious, still in IT, and still partial to non-standard solutions.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smelevicius/
Mikael Holmberg
Mikael is a Distinguished Engineer at Extreme Networks and a member of the company’s Office of the CTO, one of only a handful of engineers to hold that title there. He is a subject-matter expert in networking architectures and technologies, including AI and cloud, with more than 30 years of international experience. He also serves on a range of industry committees.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/informationtechnology-holmberg/
Theo Voss
Theo joined the Program Committee in 2026. He has been active in the Internet community for over a decade, co-founding Community-IX, a non-profit supporting Internet initiatives, and presenting at industry conferences along the way. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Inter.link, he focuses on sustainable, innovative connectivity. He is keen to contribute to BalticNOG by supporting its events and programs.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theovoss/
Submit your talk
The committee is now reviewing proposals for BalticNOG 2026, which takes place on 23–24 September in Riga. If you have been working on something the network operator community should hear about, whether that is a deep technical case study, lessons learned from an outage, a policy perspective, or a tool you have built, this is the time to put it forward.
Submit your proposal here: https://balticnog.org/call-for-papers/
We are looking forward to reading your submissions.
