Program Committee

Abhishek is a Senior Software Engineer, Master Inventor at IBM Research and co-chairs the CNCF Batch System Initiative. He works closely with Red Hat as a Partner Engineer. He focuses on resource management, performance, and distributed computing for AI workloads in the cloud. He enjoys designing easy-to-use solutions for the cloud and has 40+ patents filed. When possible he likes to explore different adventure sports and take culinary vacations.

Allen Pais is a Senior Engineering Manager at Microsoft focused on Linux kernel engineering, hardware enablement, and scalable systems. He combines deep low-level expertise (kernel, virtualization, performance) with strong technical leadership, driving cross-team execution, automation, and long-term architectural alignment while mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards.

Amit Pundir is a Senior Engineer at Linaro with nearly 20 years of experience in the architectural stability and long-term maintenance of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Embedded Linux Systems. He specializes in the enablement, maintenance, and optimization of Android on ARM platforms.

He is an active contributor to the AOSP and the Linux kernel. He is a maintainer for several key AOSP reference platforms, where he oversees platform bring-up, regression testing, and upstreaming efforts. Amit was also an early contributor to the foundational ARMv8 (64-bit) Android enablement.

He has served on the Android Microconference Program Committee at the Linux Plumbers Conference since 2021 and helped run the AOSP Devrooms at FOSDEM ’25 and IndiaFOSS ’25. He also helps run the Linux Kernel Bangalore meetup. He is a founding member of aosp-devs.org and a lead maintainer for devboardsforandroid.linaro.org community initiatives, dedicated to bridging the gap between upstream development and reference hardware. Amit is a frequent speaker at major industry summits, including the Embedded Linux Conference, the Open Source Summit, FOSDEM, IndiaFOSS and Linaro Connect.

Animesh Pathak is a Developer Relations Engineer with a strong focus on Database DevOps, testing, and open-source innovation. Currently at Harness, he plays a key role in building and evangelizing scalable DBDevOps workflows, bridging the gap between developers and data teams to accelerate secure, reliable software delivery.

Annie Talvasto is an award-winning international technology speaker and leader. She has spoken at over 100+ tech events worldwide, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and Microsoft Build & Ignite. She has been recognized with the CNCF Ambassador, Azure & AI Platform MVP awards. She has co-organized the Kubernetes & CNCF Finland meetup since 2017. In the past, she has also served as a track chair for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Program Chair for Secure AI Summit (powered by Cloud Native) and hosted Cloud Native Live, a weekly livestream by CNCF, for over 3 years.

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning networking, orchestrations, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was recently voted among the Top 5 Movers and Shakers in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source networking, orchestration & edge/IOT, including LF Networking projects (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, Akraino/Edge/IOT, etc.) as well as major industry disruptions including VNFs to CNFs (Cloud Native Network functions), 5G, AI, etc.

Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth. He has orchestrated and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO, VP, and Engineering roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

Atish Patra is a Linux kernel developer at Meta and an open-source champion driving advancements in RISC-V Linux support, including boot process standardization, UEFI support, virtualization enablement, confidential computing, and performance monitoring. A vocal advocate for open-source innovation, he is a regular presenter at conferences like OSS/ELCE, LPC, and the RISC-V Summit. Atish maintains the RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI) specification and co-maintains OpenSBI, an open-source runtime firmware for RISC-V that enables seamless compatibility across platforms and empowers developers globally.

Divya is a Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE, advocating for and contributing to its projects. She is a Kubernetes documentation maintainer and a co-chair for the SIG Community under the Bytecode Alliance. As one of the KCNA exam creators and a lead for the Asian chapter of the CHAOSS Project, she is invested in making technical communities & technologies more accessible & inclusive.

Elena Zannoni is a Senior Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle,
with focus on Toolchain, Tracing and Ksplice services. With 30 years
experience in the Linux area, Elena has presented at many Linux
Foundation conferences on various development related topics, like
Tracing, BPF, DTrace, CTF, and more. Some of the current most visible
projects in Elena’s team are writing a GCC backend for BPF and
SFrame. Elena has been part of the Linux Plumbers Conference
committee, and part of the OSS/LinuxCon Program committee for several
years. In addition Elena is a member of the Sourceware Project
Leadership Committee.

Evan Anderson is the founder of Custcodian, a software supply chain company that aims to remove the pain and friction of tracking security standards. He’s also a founder of the Knative (CNCF — serverless), and Minder (OpenSSF — supply chain) projects, and a member of CNCF TAG-Security and OpenSSF Baseline. He’s previously worked at Google, VMware, and Stacklok. Father, recovering SRE, ongoing runner.

India’s First Technical Trainer for The Linux Foundation, Course Maintainer, Author, Moderator & Kubestronaut.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as a Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment. He also works closely with Linux Foundation members and projects, and on key initiatives to advance Linux.

Greg created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE.

Greg is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and a member of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. He has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development.

Hrittik is a TPME at Loft Labs and a CNCF Ambassador, with expertise in cloud native technologies and open source communities. He has contributed extensively to developer advocacy, technical writing, and community engagement. Hrittik has been a featured speaker at events such as KubeCons, Kubernetes Community Days, Open Source Summits, and more, and has served as a Program Committee member for several KubeCons and CloudNativeCons.

After 20 years of working as a software engineer, Jake stopped writing software and started writing *about* software—and more—at LWN.net. 19 years later, he’s still at it. He lives in Baja California Sur, México with his wife and a loony dog.

Kamalesh is a Linux kernel engineer with 18+ years of experience working on core kernel subsystems including livepatching, scheduler, RAS, and kpatch tooling. He is a co-maintainer of libcgroup and an active contributor to the Linux kernel’s cgroup subsystem, focusing on improving resource management for modern workloads. His current work focuses on advancing cgroup capabilities in the Linux kernel to better support cloud infrastructure and large-scale Linux deployments.

Kate Stewart works with the safety, security and license compliance communities to advance the adoption of best practices into embedded open source projects. She has launched the ELISA and Zephyr Projects, as well as supporting other embedded projects. With more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles in software development, architecture, and product management, primarily in the tooling and embedded ecosystem working with international teams.

Strategic Technology Leader | Engineering Leadership & AI Infrastructure Accomplished leader with over 19 years of experience delivering complex embedded products, enterprise server solutions, and automotive platforms. Proven track record of managing global teams, optimising high-performance Linux systems, driving open source initiatives and driving innovation in AI stack profiling. Expert at bridging technical architecture with business value to lead large-scale engineering organisations through digital transformation and product evolution.

Matthew Crawford has been working at Arm since 2017 mainly focussing on the Third Party Intellectual Property strategy and process management. His professional accomplishments include working to make Arm OpenChain conformant in 2019; involvement in the Google Summer of Code as a mentor and working with the SPDX community. He joined the OpenChain board in 2022 and has a strong passion for open source hardware and software governance, trust and security. Since 2022 Matthew has worked in AI compliance and leads Arm’s AI Office

Mike Bursell is the Executive Director of the Confidential Computing Consortium, having been involved since its foundation in 2019. He is one of the co-founders of the open source Enarx project and was CEO and co-founder of the start-up Profian and currently holds advisory board roles with various start-ups. Previous companies include Red Hat, Intel and Citrix, with roles in security, virtualisation and networking. He regularly speaks at industry events in Europe, North America and APAC and has a YouTube channel dedicated to cybersecurity education.

Professional interests include: Confidential Computing, the EU Cybersecurity Resilience Act (CRA), Linux, trust, open source software and community, security, decentralised and distributed systems, Web3, blockchain.

Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University, and is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud”, published by Wiley. He holds over 100 patents and previously served on the Red Hat patent review committee.

Natali Vlatko (she/her) is a Director of Open Source Software Engineering at Cisco, specializing in open software, policy, and governance. She is a SIG Docs Co-Chair for Kubernetes and a member of the TODO Group Steering Committee. She plays on the fun computer in her spare time. Her academic background is in Egyptology and Archaeology; specifically, burial customs across the various kingdoms of Ancient Egypt. Ask her about dead stuff.

Nishant Lakshmikanth is an Engineering Leader at LinkedIn, with over 12 years of experience designing and leading large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure. He currently drives LinkedIn’s recommendation infrastructure, including the People You May Know (PYMK) system, a critical initiative responsible for generating millions in annual revenue, engaging over one billion members worldwide. His work integrates cutting-edge technologies like graph-based models, entity-based recommender systems, and advanced machine learning frameworks.

In the realm of machine learning infrastructure, Nishant has spearheaded the development of distributed training systems, real-time feature population pipelines, and solutions for remotely hosting complex models, enabling seamless integration of large-scale AI systems into production environments and ensuring their accessibility and reliability. He has also contributed to building highly reliable tracking systems, GPU optimizations, and cost-efficient large language model (LLM) deployments tailored for recommendation systems, advancing the scalability and efficiency of LinkedIn’s ML-powered products.

Before LinkedIn, Nishant held key engineering roles at Amazon Web Services and Cisco. At AWS, he contributed to Elastic Block Storage (EBS), where he designed a distributed volume placement system and optimized replication strategies, earning seven patents. At Cisco, he advanced video streaming and encoding technologies, demonstrating expertise in backend systems.

Nishant’s technical contributions extend beyond systems design to fostering innovation, mentoring engineering talent, and advancing engineering standards. His extensive experience with control plane for managing complex distributed systems, bootstrapping cloud services and building machine learning infrastructures places him at the forefront of innovation.

Ritika Dhiman is a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, working on real-time communication systems for Amazon Connect. She holds a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University and is actively involved in hackathon and technical mentorship. Her work sits at the intersection of scalable systems, applied AI, and community impact.

I am Open source Linux kernel developer, contributed in Linux virtualization and other open source project includes DPDK and OVS. Leading a Core Linux kernel opensource focused datacenter engineering team contributing in the areas of Secure Virtualization, Memory Management, IOMMU, Linux Scheduler and PMU. I hold 1 approved patent and another 2 under review.

Saurabh Sengar is a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, leading the Linux Kernel engineering team.
With over 15 years of experience in Linux kernel development, Saurabh has authored more than 100 upstream kernel commits across a broad range of subsystems, including early boot optimization, DeviceTree enhancements, Virtual Trust Levels (VTL), display, storage, and Hyper-V/VMBus drivers. He currently serves as the maintainer of Microsoft’s OpenHCL Linux kernel, driving reliability, performance, and feature enablement for cloud and enterprise workloads.
He is an active contributor to the open-source community and has previously mentored engineers through the Outreach mentorship program. He is also a frequent technical speaker, having presented multiple papers at leading Linux kernel forums, including the Linux Plumbers Conference.

Shivay Lamba is a software engineer and open source contributor passionate about AI and edge computing. With experience across startups and enterprise tech, he focuses on simplifying complex technologies for developers. Shivay actively speaks at global conferences, organizes community events, and contributes to projects in cloud-native ecosystems, WebAssembly, and machine learning. He has also built and mentored educational programs to bridge gaps in emerging tech adoption.

Shuah Khan is a Kernel Maintainer & Linux Fellow at The Linux Foundation. She is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor. She authored, A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development (LFD103) training course. She designed and leads the Mentorship program aimed at increasing diversity in open source and providing equitable access to learning resources.

She serves on the Linux kernel Code of Conduct committee and the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board.

I am a seasoned engineering leader with over 15 years of experience in distributed systems architecture, databases, security, and AI/ML-powered systems at scale. At LinkedIn, I architected a privacy platform handling 20 million queries per second and built the Trusted Graph system with over 100 million verifications — delivering mission-critical infrastructure that sat at the intersection of distributed systems, data, and security.
My areas of expertise span AI/ML application development, large-scale distributed systems, database architecture, and security and privacy platforms. I am passionate about advancing open technology ecosystems and bringing practitioner perspectives to conversations around scalability, reliability, and responsible AI. I am eager to contribute to the Open Source Summit community by helping shape a program that reflects the real-world challenges engineers face when building intelligent, secure, and highly available systems at scale.

Srivatsa Bhat is a Principal Software Engineer in the Linux Systems Group at Microsoft. He has been an upstream kernel maintainer of subsystems such as Generic Paravirt-Ops and VMware Hypervisor Interface. He has contributed towards CPU hotplug locking scalability and Memory Power Management in the Linux kernel and has presented talks at Linux conferences such as Linux Kernel Summit, Linux Conf Australia and Linux Plumbers Conference, as well as academic/research conferences such as SOSP. Srivatsa has also been a distro kernel maintainer, architect of a Linux Real-Time distro and has published research papers on scaling filesystems to many cores.

Steven Rostedt currently works for Google on the ChromeOS baseOS performance team. He is the main developer and maintainer for ftrace, the official tracer of the Linux kernel, as well as the user space tools and libraries that interact with the Linux tracing interface. Steven is also one of the original developers for the Real Time patch (PREEMPT_RT) and still helps maintain the stable releases of the Real Time patch set. He also develops ktest.pl (in the kernel) and created the “make localmodconfig” option.

Sumit has been working in the OSS space for the past 20+ years. Currently he leads the Virtualization efforts at Linaro. Previously he has led the Android team at Linaro, helping the AOSP ecosystem to improve.

He has been part of the core team for Android microconference at Linux Plumbers, as well as of the Program Committee of the first OSS India.

Takashi Ninjouji, Chief Engineer at Honda Motor Co., Ltd., focuses on software-defined vehicles (SDV) and the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). He is also interested in security assurance and SBOM. He spent 10 years in R&D in the telecommunications and mobile industries. In the past 15 years, he has established and operated OSPOs at companies in web/IT and infrastructure. He also contributes to the OpenChain, SPDX, and AGL.

Tim Pepper is an engineer and executive with almost 30 years experience in open source software development. Tim’s work has touched many dimensions of software stack code (Linux/kernels, storage, mobile and embedded systems, power and performance, cloud orchestration, AI/ML frameworks) as well as how that software is developed and maintained (steering and conduct committees, mentorship, open source program offices, public policy, legal compliance, software supply chain security). In what free time remains, Tim dabbles at being a backyard farmer, homebrewer, woodworker, Vespa rider, and amateur triathlete.

Vinod is subsystem maintainer of Linux Kernel’s soundwire subsystem, Generic Phy subsystem, and dmaengine subsystem, He also maintains the ALSA compressed audio framework & Library. Vinod has two decades of embedded development experience in Intel and Linaro in the area of BSP development, display, audio etc. Vinod runs Linux Kernel Bangalore meetup chapter and has spoken at ELC, LPC and other events.