Mark Pollack

Dr. Mark Pollack is the creator of AgentWorks, an open-source agent engineering stack for the JVM, and the founder of Spring AI. After more than twenty years building the Spring ecosystem's data and integration projects, he now works independently on the infrastructure that makes AI agents dependable: durable workflow orchestration, execution tracing and cost metering, evaluation and judging, sandboxed execution, and a multi-provider client that drives agentic CLIs — Claude Code, Gemini, Qwen, Amazon Q — behind a single API. The stack spans agent-workflow, agent-journal, agent-judge, agent-bench, agent-sandbox, agent-hooks, and agent-client, alongside the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) Java SDK and claude-agent-sdk-java, the Java SDK mirroring Anthropic's official SDKs.

His current research, Agent Control Theory, treats coding agents as systems to be measured and steered rather than prompted and hoped for: capture the full execution trajectory, judge the outcome, and use the data to characterize and then improve agent behavior. The approach draws on his pre-Spring career in experimental physics, where he built offline computing systems for high-energy nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory before moving to front-office trading systems in finance.

Mark has been part of Spring since 2003, when he contributed its JMS support. As founder and lead of Spring AI he brought LLM integration, RAG, vector stores, and tool calling to Java and Spring developers. He previously founded and led Spring Data, Spring Cloud Data Flow, Spring XD, Spring AMQP, Spring Shell, and Spring.NET.

He is a returning speaker at Devoxx Belgium, SpringOne, Spring I/O, and DevNexus, and has appeared on Software Engineering Daily. He builds in the open at lab.pollack.ai and writes at pollack.ai.