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Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

kubernetes experts - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Kubernetes has evolved into the backbone of modern cloud infrastructure — powering everything from startups to hyperscale enterprise systems.

Behind this success is a diverse group of trailblazing individuals: core contributors shaping Kubernetes itself, founders building companies around it, engineers solving real-world problems at scale, educators demystifying its complexity, and community leaders driving global adoption. This curated and updated list features 16 of the most influential Kubernetes experts active in 2024–2025 — selected for their technical impact, open-source contributions, startup leadership, and thought leadership across the ecosystem.

  1. Brendan Burns
  2. Brandon Philips
  3. Liz Rice
  4. Joe Beda
  5. Justin Santa Barbara
  6. Craig McLuckie
  7. Stephen Augustus
  8. Janet Kuo
  9. Tim Hockin
  10. Brian Grant
  11. Clayton Coleman
  12. Chen Goldberg
  13. Michelle Noorali
  14. Nikhita Raghunath
  15. Davanum “Dims” Srinivas
  16. Saad Ali

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable journeys and contributions:

Brendan Burns

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes project and one of its original architects.

While at Google, he helped create Kubernetes out of the lessons from Google’s internal Borg system. He later moved to Microsoft, where he is now a Corporate Vice President for Azure cloud-native open source, spearheading Kubernetes and DevOps tooling on Azure. Burns also co-authored Kubernetes: Up and Running and continues to guide the Kubernetes ecosystem’s evolution. Under his leadership, Microsoft became a major Kubernetes contributor, and he’s written extensively about making containers and cloud platforms more developer-friendly.

Brandon Philips

Nationality: American

Brandon Philips is a co-founder and former CTO of CoreOS, one of the pioneering companies in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

At CoreOS, Philips was instrumental in creating etcd (the distributed key-value store integral to Kubernetes) and in developing CoreOS’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, Tectonic. After Red Hat acquired CoreOS in 2018, he became a VP at Red Hat working on cloud infrastructure. Philips has a deep background in Linux and distributed systems and was an early advocate of cloud-native principles. He continues to advise and invest in open-source startups. On social media, Brandon is an influential voice – his bio highlights his role at CoreOS and interests in Kubernetes and containers. His technical contributions (like etcd and the Operator pattern) and leadership in a successful Kubernetes startup firmly establish Brandon Philips among the top Kubernetes experts.

Liz Rice

Understanding how things work under the hood makes you infinitely better at securing them.

Nationality: British

Liz Rice is a globally recognized expert on containers and Kubernetes security. She was the Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent (the company behind Cilium eBPF) and served as the co-chair of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon in 2018.

Liz is well known for her educational talks that demystify container internals and security, and she authored the O’Reilly book Container Security. A frequent keynote speaker at KubeCon and other conferences, Rice has been a vocal proponent of making cloud-native technologies more secure and understandable. She’s also been a maintainer of open source projects (like fitting Linux tools into containers) and active in the CNCF Security TAG. In 2024, Liz continues to be an influencer at the intersection of Kubernetes, eBPF, and security – especially after Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent, which she joined to champion open source. Her clear communication and technical chops place her among the Kubernetes elite.

Joe Beda

Joe Beda - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Nationality: American

Joe Beda is another co-founder of Kubernetes and was the first person to commit code to the project.

At Google, Beda was the principal engineer who kickstarted Kubernetes and shaped its architecture. He later co-founded Heptio (a Kubernetes-focused startup) with Craig McLuckie to help enterprises adopt Kubernetes; Heptio was acquired by VMware in 2018. After serving as a principal engineer at VMware, Beda is now semi-retired but remains an active open source contributor. His decade-plus of experience (Google, Microsoft, VMware, etc.) and continued coding on tools around Kubernetes make him a respected elder statesman in the cloud-native community.

Justin Santa Barbara

Nationality: American

Justin Santa Barbara is a long-time Kubernetes contributor known for creating kOps, the “kubectl for clusters,” which is a tool that makes it easier to install and manage Kubernetes clusters.

He began contributing to Kubernetes in 2014 and was the original maintainer of Kubernetes’ AWS support. Justin co-founded FathomDB (a cloud DB startup) earlier in his career and later joined the Kubernetes community, where he co-led SIG-AWS and started the kOps project. After Heptio’s formation, he joined Google Cloud. As of 2025, Justin leads a team at Google focused on improving Kubernetes cluster lifecycle and configuration as data. His pragmatic engineering (kOps is now a CNCF project and considered a “production grade” installer) and vision for simplifying ops have made Kubernetes more accessible. Justin’s blend of hands-on coding and architectural insight secure his place among the top experts.

Craig McLuckie

Craig McLuckie - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Nationality: South African

Craig McLuckie is a co-creator of Kubernetes and played a key role in its success.

At Google, he was the original Product Lead for Google Compute Engine and then for the Kubernetes project. He went on to co-found Heptio with Joe Beda, and after VMware acquired Heptio, McLuckie served as VP of R&D for VMware’s Tanzu platform. In 2023, he started a new venture as CEO of Stacklok, focusing on open-source supply chain security. McLuckie also helped bootstrap the CNCF, the foundation that sustains Kubernetes. His blend of technical leadership and startup entrepreneurship – all while staying engaged with Kubernetes and cloud-native development – cements his reputation as a top expert.

Stephen Augustus

Nationality: American

Stephen Augustus is a Kubernetes leader known for his work in release engineering and community governance.

He serves on the Kubernetes Steering Committee and has been a chair of SIG Release (overseeing the Kubernetes release process). Stephen co-founded critical project processes like the Kubernetes Enhancement Proposals (KEPs) and the Working Group for Naming to remove harmful terminology. Professionally, he led open source programs at companies like Red Hat, VMware (via Heptio), and Cisco – where he founded the Open Source Program Office. Stephen is also a CNCF SIG Contributor Strategy alumni and was a Program Chair for KubeCon. A strong diversity advocate, he co-created the Inclusive Naming Initiative. With his prolific contributions (among CNCF’s top 100 committers) and strategic vision, Stephen Augustus is unquestionably one of today’s top Kubernetes experts and community leaders.

Janet Kuo

Nationality: Taiwanese

Janet Kuo is a longtime Kubernetes maintainer at Google and a co-chair of SIG Apps (the group that oversees the Workloads API).

She has been contributing to Kubernetes since version 1.0, with a focus on the workloads controllers (Deployments, Jobs, etc.) and making Kubernetes easier to use for app developers. Janet also served as a KubeCon program co-chair and is a highly visible speaker in the community. In her role, she helped evolve Kubernetes’s core API for running applications over the past decade, ensuring features like Deployments and StatefulSets met user needs. Colleagues describe her as a steadying force in the project, and her dedication to mentoring and documentation has been vital. Janet Kuo’s blend of technical skill and community leadership makes her one of the top Kubernetes experts to know.

Tim Hockin

Tim Hockin - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Nationality: American

Tim Hockin is one of Kubernetes’ earliest and most prolific contributors.

As a Principal Software Engineer at Google (and Google Distinguished Engineer), Hockin was part of the original Kubernetes team and is often called a Kubernetes co-founder. He has been a top committer to the project for years and is known for shaping core areas like networking and cluster infrastructure. Hockin’s influence extends to Kubernetes architecture decisions and keeping the project grounded in simplicity (he famously advocates for a “complexity budget” in Kubernetes design). In 2024, he received the CNCF “Top Committer” award for his continued technical contributions. Simply put, Tim Hockin’s code and guidance are deeply woven into the fabric of Kubernetes.

Brian Grant

Nationality: American

Brian Grant was the original lead architect of Kubernetes at Google and is credited with creating the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM), which underpins how Kubernetes declares and manages resources.

A Google Distinguished Engineer, he is one of the founders of Kubernetes and previously worked on Google’s internal Borg system. Grant’s fingerprints are on many core design decisions of Kubernetes (such as the declarative API and controllers), and he chaired SIG Architecture for the project. In recent years, he helped drive Kubernetes’ extensibility and launched a startup (ConfigHub) to rethink cloud configuration. With a rare mix of deep technical expertise and visionary thinking about orchestration, Brian Grant remains a highly influential Kubernetes expert.

Clayton Coleman

Nationality: American

Clayton Coleman is a top Kubernetes maintainer and one of the earliest contributors from outside Google.

As a senior engineer at Red Hat, he famously placed an early bet on Kubernetes, becoming the first external contributor to the project. Coleman was the chief architect of Red Hat OpenShift (which adopted Kubernetes as its base) and has driven Kubernetes features around networking, multi-tenancy, and developer experience. He co-led SIG-OpenShift and contributed extensively to Kubernetes SIG Architecture and SIG API Machinery. Clayton’s open source leadership continued at Red Hat (now part of IBM), and in 2023 he joined Google Cloud, bringing his expertise full circle. A Kubernetes maintainer with hundreds of commits, Clayton Coleman’s active coding and pragmatic design sense have been essential to Kubernetes’ success in hybrid-cloud deployments.

Chen Goldberg

Chen Goldberg - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Nationality: Israeli

Chen Goldberg is a senior engineering leader who has guided Kubernetes development at the highest levels.

As General Manager and VP of Engineering for Cloud Runtimes at Google Cloud, she led the teams building GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) and OSS Kubernetes, as well as adjacent products like Cloud Run. Under her leadership, Google Cloud introduced innovations to make Kubernetes more scalable and integrated (and even explored Kubernetes for AI workloads). In late 2024, Chen joined CoreWeave as SVP of Engineering, where she now applies her Kubernetes expertise to running AI and high-performance workloads at scale. With over 25 years in software, she’s known for her ability to lead large engineering orgs while staying hands-on with technology. Chen Goldberg’s influence in the Kubernetes ecosystem – from core open source contributions to managed services – makes her one of the top experts and role models, especially for women in cloud engineering.

Michelle Noorali

Nationality: American

Michelle Noorali is a prominent Kubernetes contributor and a champion for the developer experience in cloud-native.

She is a senior software engineer at Microsoft, a CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) member, and was a core maintainer of Helm – the package manager for Kubernetes. Michelle co-created Helm while at Deis and helped it become a CNCF project, simplifying application deployment on Kubernetes. She also co-led SIG Apps in Kubernetes, guiding improvements to how workloads are defined and managed. Michelle has keynoted KubeCon with messages about open source inclusivity and was a KubeCon co-chair in 2017. Her mix of technical leadership (driving Helm to CNCF graduation) and community influence (mentoring new contributors, advocating for women in tech) firmly establish her as a top Kubernetes expert.

Nikhita Raghunath

Nationality: Indian

Nikhita Raghunath is one of the youngest leaders in the Kubernetes project and has quickly become a pillar of the community.

Based in Bangalore (and now an engineer at VMware’s successor Broadcom), she is a core maintainer of Kubernetes and has served on the Kubernetes Steering Committee. Nikhita started as an Outreachy intern and rose to drive major contributions – notably in Kubernetes contributor experience and the API machinery. She co-created Kubernetes’ PR workflow automation and was elected vice-chair of the CNCF TOC in 2023. Known for her enthusiasm and mentorship, Nikhita often speaks about how “stable and boring” Kubernetes has become (a positive sign of maturity). She helps ensure the project’s long-term health. Her journey from newcomer to steering committee member and CNCF ambassador makes Nikhita a standout Kubernetes expert of the next generation.

Davanum “Dims” Srinivas

Davanum Dims Srinivas - Kubernetes Experts Who Get It Done – 16 of the Best

Nationality: Indian

Davanum Srinivas (known as “Dims”) is a veteran open source contributor who has been instrumental in many CNCF projects, including Kubernetes.

He is a Principal Engineer at AWS, dedicated full-time to Kubernetes upstream development. Dims has contributed across the Kubernetes codebase – from the core to CLI and client libraries – and is a leader in SIG Architecture and SIG Node. He also served on the CNCF TOC, bringing his cross-project insight. Previously at Huawei, he helped drive cloud vendor participation in Kubernetes. In 2024, Dims’ work on making Kubernetes build/test infrastructure more efficient and improving dependency management was widely recognized. He remains a tireless force in keeping Kubernetes project healthy (sometimes jokingly called the “human CNCF glue”). With his breadth of knowledge and sustained contributions, Dims is among the top Kubernetes experts and open source champions.

Saad Ali

Nationality: American

Saad Ali is the foremost expert on Kubernetes storage. A Senior Staff Engineer and tech lead at Google Cloud, he co-created the Container Storage Interface (CSI) and led SIG Storage in Kubernetes. Saad’s work was crucial in making stateful workloads viable in Kubernetes – he drove features like Persistent Volumes, StorageClasses, and volume snapshots. He often speaks about the journey of Kubernetes storage from the project’s early “no persistence” days to the robust ecosystem of CSI plugins today. In addition to storage, Saad has chaired Kubernetes release teams and mentored new contributors. His combination of coding (he’s behind many storage APIs) and community leadership (multiple KubeCon keynotes) makes him one of the top Kubernetes experts, especially in the realm of data management and stateful applications in Kubernetes.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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