Program Committee

Engineer, architect, advisor and technology leader based in Seattle, Washington. Current research areas are on LLM inference, open AI, containers & serverless. CNCF Ambassador at the Linux Foundation and community lead of Cloud Native Seattle. Packt tech advisory board. Guest lecturer and industry mentor at the University of Washington. 

Intrapreneur. Has managed, built, and scaled several tier-1 products, new initiatives 0-1, businesses, and teams spanning various technical domains. Include AWS Bedrock (Anthropic LLM model inference), S3, App Runner (Founding engineer & TLM), Fargate, Alexa AI (Founding engineer of Healthcare domain), Payments (manage $110B ARR Bill Run), and Elastic Container Service (ECS). 

Part-time advisor and researcher as well as a public speaker and author. Drive cloud-native solutions adoption across organizations and actively contribute to open-source programs, including Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Flux, Envoy, OpenTelemetry, gRPC, Firecracker, Kafka, containerd, and RocksDB. 

Serve as Program Committee member for prestigious global academic and industry conferences: The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), PyTorch Con, Open Source Summit, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, DockerCon etc.

Senior speaker at Amazon and author, casually writing blog posts in spare time on technical topics, academia, open source, organizational behavior (OB), and sociology. Pickleball fan.

Homepage: https://pengandy.com/

Animesh Pathak is a Developer Relations Engineer with a strong focus on Database DevOps, APIs, 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.

Previously at Keploy, Animesh actively contributed to open-source projects and empowered engineering teams by advocating for modern API testing practices. He brings deep experience in community building, technical storytelling, and developer enablement, having spoken at several developer events and authored technical content that simplifies complex DevOps concepts.

Anita is a Developer Advocate and technical writer with a track record leading great efforts in open source and cloud communities on a global scale. Her dedication extends to fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) within the tech ecosystem.

Atish Patra is a Linux kernel developer at Rivos 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.

Ayumi Watanabe is a core member of OpenChain Japan community and known as an evangelist who is certified by the Linux Foundation Japan. Her strong point is a knowledge of many tools for SBOM generation and management, a wide range of experiences as an OSS management consultant, and strong connection with communities regarding OSS compliance. She is also a member of Hitachi OSPO.

Bandan is an engineer at Red Hat focused on systems architecture and virtualization. His primary interests are in performance optimization and in investigating new usecases for emerging technology in virtualization such as confidential computing. Bandan is part of the Red Hat Research program and has co-published papers in topics related to fuzzing and systems security.

I am the AI Team lead for the OSPO creating the upstream strategy for Red Hat to align with open source communities aligned to our mission and technical vision.

My role as Sr.Principal Community Architect within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) has allowed me to work in a variety of Linux Foundation communities such as the CNCF, FINOS, Green Software Foundation, LF AI & Data, vLLM and more. I have previously held leadership roles in FINOS and the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

Cara has over 15 years in marketing and community engagement with the primary focus being in the financial services industry. Cara holds a B.S. in Political Science from Virginia Polytechnic & State University.

Chris Xie is a global open source strategist and advocate for sustainable technology and responsible AI. As Head of Open Source Strategy at Futurewei, he brings extensive expertise from Fortune 500 companies and startups, blending technical vision with strategic leadership.

Chris holds key roles in open source organizations, including:
• Chair, ORES Working Group at LF Energy (open renewable energy systems)
• Chair, SCER Working Group at Green Software Foundation (sustainable computing)
• Chair, Marketing Advisory Committee at LF Energy
• Board Advisor, LF Research

His work spans open source policy, governance, and global collaboration, focusing on Responsible AI, Renewable Energy, and the Decentralized Internet. Through initiatives like the Open Source Congress, he helps shape policy, research, and innovation to drive an inclusive and sustainable digital future.

Daniel Oh is a Java Champion and Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat to evangelize developers for building cloud-native apps and serverless ob Kubernetes ecosystems. He’s also contributing to various cloud open-source projects and ecosystems as a CNCF ambassador for accelerating DevOps adoption in enterprises. He’s speaking at lots of technical seminars, workshops, and meetups to elaborate on new emerging technologies for enterprise developers & DevOps teams.

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.

Donghee Na is a CPython Core Developer and a 2025 Python Steering Council member. He contributes to improving CPython’s performance, maintenance, and internal implementations.
he pursues shaping Python’s future by ensuring its efficiency, stability, and long-term growth.
He is also passionate about fostering CPython activities in the APAC region, organizing local Core Sprints, and encouraging developer engagement in open-source contributions.

👋 Hi, I’m Ezequiel Lanza (Eze), and I’m passionate about helping people explore the thrilling realm of artificial intelligence. As a regular AI conference presenter, I take pride in creating impactful use cases, tutorials, and guides to assist developers in adopting open source AI tools.

With a solid foundation in engineering and a decade of experience assisting customers and developers in the software realm, I bring a wealth of practical knowledge to the table. Currently, I’m writing my thesis as I pursue a Master’s in Data Science from Universidad Austral in Argentina (Yeah, it was AI before ChatGPT:) ).

I’m usually an AI speaker at conferences like Open Source Summit, Kubecon, All Things Open, ODSC and AAAI among other relevant AI events. 

Hrttik Roy is a Platform Advocate 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 Kubernetes Community Days, Open Source Summits, and more, and has served as a Program Committee member for several KubeCons and CloudNativeCons.

His best days are when he finds ways to create impact in the communities he’s a part of either by code, content, or mentorship!

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), a member of the Linux
Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Kerim is a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp, where he coaches operators and developers on sustainable infrastructure and orchestration workflows.

Before he joined HashiCorp, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport and helped museums bring more of their collections online.

When Kerim isn’t working, he’s either spending time with his daughter, enjoying aerial photography, or baking a cake.

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

Natali Vlatko (she/her) is an Open Source Architect at Cisco, specializing in open software, policy, compliance, and governance, and is a SIG Docs Co-Chair for Kubernetes. 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.

Nicole has worked in different projects developing safety relevant embedded software before starting as an independent safety assessor. 
With now more than ten years of experience as a functional safety expert, she supported several customers to show their compliance with ISO 26262 and/or other safety standards. Currently she is utilizing her experience regarding the development of highly reliable software to enable both closed and open source solutions to be used in critical products, focusing on safety, security and compliance.

Nigel is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Austin, Texas. He was drawn to the craft of software engineering because of the agency it provides people to build and interact with worlds of their own creation. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies and his passions in technology are community building, High Performance Computing, and free and open source software (and hardware).

I am a Software Engineer specializing in managing Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, and Azure public clouds. At Confluent, we run stateful and data-intensive applications such as Kafka and Flink on Kubernetes clusters.

With expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and backend development, I help design scalable, resilient cloud-native solutions. 
Previously, I worked on Oracle’s Kubernetes Engine team, enhancing its managed Kubernetes service. 
I’m passionate about solving complex engineering challenges in cloud environments.

Apart from learning about distributed systems and infrastructure, I enjoy cycling & cooking!

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.

Ryan has been working on software security and quality for 27 years. In his career, he has implemented security features in open source software stacks, been an offensive security researcher, been a developer and security architect for numerous open source projects including 3 different Linux distributions as well as Android. He has also been responsible for defining software security & quality development policies for multiple Fortune 500 companies. These days, he is Deputy Chief Product Security Officer for Carrier where he is focused on improving software development practices, Chair of the OpenSSF Security Tooling WG, and also spends time doing work as an expert witness testifying on quality software development practices.

Shane Coughlan is an expert in communication, security and business development. His professional accomplishments include building the largest open source governance community in the world through the OpenChain Project, spearheading the licensing team that elevated Open Invention Network into the largest patent non-aggression community in history and establishing the first global network for open source legal experts. He is a founder of both the first law journal and the first law book dedicated to open source. He currently leads the OpenChain Project and is a General Assembly Member of OpenForum Europe.

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.

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.

Stephen Chin is VP of Developer Relations at Neo4j, member of the LF AI & Data Foundation and Open AI Alliance, and author of several titles with O’Reilly, Apress, and McGraw Hill. He has keynoted numerous conferences around the world including AI DevSummit, Devoxx, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and Open Source India. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done evangelism tours in Europe, Japan, and Brazil, interviewing developers in their natural habitat. When he is not traveling, he enjoys teaching kids how to do AI, embedded, and robot programming together with his daughters.

Theodore Ts’o is the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and started working with Linux in September, 1991. He also served as the
tech lead for the MIT Kerberos V5 development team, and served as a chair of IP Security working group at the IETF. He previously served
as CTO for the Linux Foundation, and is currently employed at Google. Theodore is a Debian Developer, and is the maintainer of the ext4 file
system in the Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and original author of the e2fsprogs userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 file
systems.

I am a software engineer working in the intersection of databases, security and cloud native technologies. I also serve as one of the tech leads of Kubernetes SIG Release