Vita Bortnikov is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the distributed systems architect for IBM scalable technologies, including cloud and blockchain focusing on high availability and scalability. She has been leading distributed computing, large scale infrastructure and cloud activities in IBM Research - Haifa since 2005. Vita’s work has impacted a range of IBM products and services including WebSphere (VE and Liberty), IBM PureApp, and IBM Cloud. Among her recent activities she co-leads the microservices runtime framework for IBM Cloud (Amalgam8) as well as a new scalable architecture for IBM Blockchain infrastructure. Vita received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. (both summa cum laude) degrees in computer science from the Technion in 1996 and 2000, respectively. She is an active inventor, with multiple US patents in different areas of computer science.