KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America

Chen Goldberg has more than 25 years of expertise leading global engineering teams, product R&D initiatives, and high-profile customer engagements with Fortune 500 enterprises. She is Senior Vice President of Engineering at CoreWeave, joining the executive team to lead and grow engineering functions, as well as accelerate CoreWeave’s world-class product development and offerings.

Chen isn’t new to the CNCF and is one of the folks who led Kubernetes from the early days through the 10-year anniversary celebration, as part of her previous role at Google Cloud, GM & VP Engineering for Kubernetes and Serverless.

Chen lives in Mountain View, California with her husband and 3 kids. Outside of work she enjoys hiking and making desserts.

Peter Salanki is the Chief Technology Officer of CoreWeave, where he spearheads the development of innovative cloud solutions tailored for high-performance workloads. Originally from Sweden, Peter was recruited at just 18 to become Director of Engineering at Bahnhof AB before moving to the United States to lead Solutions Architecture for Procera Networks. Peter joined CoreWeave in 2019 and has played a pivotal role in scaling CoreWeave’s infrastructure to meet the demands of diverse clients, from AI startups to Fortune 500 companies, making it the world’s first AI-specific cloud service and reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape.

Aparna Sinha is Senior Vice President, and Head of Enterprise AI/ML products at Capital One. She is also a startup investor / advisor at PearVC. Aparna has a track record of successful P&L ownership, creating new revenue streams and building $B+ businesses through technical and go-to-market innovation.

She was Sr. Director of Developer Products at Google Cloud leading a 100+ member PM, UX, and DevRel Engineering team responsible for >40 cloud services and open source tools. She was an early contributor to Kubernetes, built the team and grew Google Kubernetes Engine 100x into a Top 3 revenue generator for Cloud. Prior to Cloud Aparna worked on Android, ChromeOS and Play. Previously at McKinsey & Company she was a leader in the business technology office, working with CIOs on server virtualization strategy, pricing, and SaaS.

Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and a patent from Google. She served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Jim’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.

Taylor Dolezal, Head of Ecosystem at CNCF, is an experienced technologist with a passion for cloud native technologies. He has a rich background in software development, infrastructure management, and open source and is deeply committed to community-building and knowledge sharing. Taylor’s presentations are renowned for their technical depth, practical insights, and engaging delivery.

Justin Cappos is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University, who strives to provide service to society through technology. Justin’s research philosophy focuses on solving real world security problems in practice. He and his students often focus on problems in security, systems, software update systems, and virtualization, with an emphasis on practical research advances that can be used in production.

His research advances are adopted into production use by Docker, git, Python, VMware, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Digital Ocean, automobiles, and most Linux distributions. Due to the practical impact of his work, Justin was named to Popular Science’s Brilliant 10 list in 2013.

Santiago is an Assistant Professor at Purdue’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His interests include binary analysis, cryptography, distributed systems, and security-oriented software engineering. His current research focuses on securing the software development lifecycle, cloud security, and update systems. Santiago is a member of the Arch Linux security team and has contributed patches to F/OSS projects on various degrees of scale, including Git, the Linux Kernel, Reproducible Builds, NeoMutt, and the Briar project. Santiago is also a maintainer for Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s project The Update Framework (TUF) as well as lead the in-toto and Sigstore projects.

Tim has spent most of his career at Google, where he works on Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). He is one of the technical leads of the Kubernetes project, and has been part of it since before it was publicly announced. He mostly pays attention to topics like APIs, networking, storage, nodes, multi-cluster, resource isolation, and cluster sharing.

Karena Angell is a Senior Principal Chief Architect at Red Hat focusing on cloud native application workloads for Kubernetes, open source software projects, as well as solutions for the ‘open’ hybrid cloud.

Idit Levine is the founder and CEO of Solo.io, a company that creates open-source tools to assist enterprises in adopting and extending innovative cloud-native technologies while modernizing their existing IT investments. Solo.io is a top contributor to CNCF projects such as Envoy Proxy, Istio Service Mesh, and Cilium CNI. Their portfolio of open-source products includes Gloo Gateway, an Envoy-based gateway, and Gloo Mesh, an Istio distribution for service mesh.

Shirley Bailes has been involved in developer communities and building open source programs for over 15 years. She is the Director of Software Ecosystem Strategy in Intel’s Office of the CTO, where she leads thought leadership and strategic initiatives to accelerate startup innovation and developer ecosystem growth. She previously led open source programs at AWS and served as Co-President of the Women at Amazon Global Board. 

Jago Macleod is an Engineering Director at Google, where he leads much of the Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) team, which gives him the opportunity to work with some of Google Cloud’s largest customers. Prior to working at Google, Jago helped make the smart homes that may eventually turn against us at Nest; and before that, he made some of the games that will distract us along the way as VP of Engineering at Disney Interactive Games.

Toddy Mladenov has over 25 years of experience in software engineering and design, consulting, and product management for companies like Microsoft, T-Mobile, and SAP. He started his cloud journey 14 years ago as part of the Azure team. Since then, Toddy worked on large-scale cloud implementations using Azure and AWS by utilizing cloud-native technologies. Now, he is part of the Azure Cloud Native and Ecosystem team and is responsible for container supply chain security for Azure services and customers.

Kasper is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador, and co-founder of the Nordic meetup alliance, Cloud Native Nordics, where he serves as Community Lead. He works as Staff Platform Engineer at Lunar. He has worked at Lunar for almost 8 years, and is one of the architects behind the platform Lunar operates on today. Kasper wrote his master thesis, “KubeCloud – A Small Scale Cloud Computing Environment”, on how Universities could leverage small-scale cloud environments built out of Raspberry Pis running Kubernetes.

Sudha Raghavan is a senior vice president at Oracle, responsible for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) developer platform. In her role, she oversees the engineering organization for OCI’s cloud-native services, which are used by tens of thousands of developers globally. With over 20 years of experience in software engineering, Sudha serves as a board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is a founding committee member of the Seattle chapter of the Oracle Women’s Leadership (OWL) program. Prior to her time at Oracle, she worked at Microsoft for 14 years in various roles.

Nikhita is a principal software engineer at VMware and a maintainer of the Kubernetes project. She is the vice chair of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and has won the CNCF Top Committer Award in 2021 for her technical contributions. She was also a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee. Nikhita has been featured in Business Insider as one the ‘top 21 developers transforming Silicon Valley’.

Ricardo leads the Platform Infrastructure team at CERN with a strong focus on cloud native deployments and machine learning. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a lead of the CNCF Research User Group. Prior to this work Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Joseph Sandoval, a seasoned tech expert with 25 years in various roles running distributed systems, infrastructure platforms and thrives on empowering developers to scale their applications. An advocate for OpenSource software, he harnesses its transformative power to champion change for underrepresented individuals in the tech field.

Raghavan “Rags” Srinivas (@ragss) is an Architect/Advocate enabling developers to build scalable and available systems. With a background in app development and infrastructure, he has gravitated towards distributed systems. He specializes in Cloud Computing, specifically multi-cloud.

Rags brings over 30 years of hands-on software development experience. He has a depth and breadth of technology experience that he helps share with the community — https://thenewstack.io/author/rags-srinivas/.

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, and a CNCF TOC member and ambassador. She has worked on the Istio service mesh since the beginning of the project in 2017 and serves on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book “Istio Ambient Explained” and has more than 200 patents to her name.

Preethi Thomas is an Engineering leader at Red Hat where she is responsible for some of the core technologies. She has been part of Open Source for over 15 years and has rich experience working with upstream communities and projects. She is highly passionate about Diversity and Inclusion and actively participates in outreach.

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen (“DP”) is Chief Executive Officer of SUSE and a member of the Management Board of SUSE S.A.
Prior to joining SUSE, DP worked at Red Hat for 18 years holding a number of senior executive positions. From 2010 to 2021, he was Red Hat’s General Manager in Asia Pacific and Japan and from 2021 to 2022 their General Manager in North America.

Before joining Red Hat, he held senior roles at Planetweb, BSDI and the Santa Cruz Operation.
DP is on the board of the Institute of Systems Science at the National University of Singapore and since 2017 has been a mentor for women in business with Protégé Business Mentoring. In addition to his technical education, DP holds qualifications from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) and Harvard Business School.

Colin Walters is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and has been working with the global open source community for over 25 years.

Marcin Wielgus is a Staff Software Engineer at Google. Marcin joined the company in 2010 and since then he has been working on various projects, ranging from Android applications to recommendation engines. He started contributing to Kubernetes before the 1.0 release and currently leads the K8S batch team at Google.

Bob Wise is the EVP and CEO for Heroku at Salesforce.com. Heroku, a platform as a service (PaaS), enables developers to build, run, and operate applications on the cloud. Prior to his time at Salesforce, Bob was the GM for EKS, EKS-A, ROSA and was responsible for the Amazon OSPO. He was CTO for Samsung’s cloud native effort, ran engineering for HP Cloud, and has worked for a number of startups as a CTO.