Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company providing software solutions to government and financial services providers. Trifork is also creator of the long-running GOTO conference (formerly known as JAOO), and co-creator of QCon. As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical strategy, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for GOTO and QCon conferences. Kresten has also been a principal contributor to Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where he authored many core elements.

Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, AUC TeX, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.

More recently, Kresten has been hacking Erlang projects, and founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine, as well as several smaller open source packages for Erlang.