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Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

saltstack experts - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

SaltStack has become a cornerstone of infrastructure automation, fueled by a passionate and highly skilled global community.

This includes prolific open-source contributors, startup founders still building hands-on, influential educators and speakers, engineers driving adoption at major tech companies, and competition-winning innovators. Below is an updated list of 12 of the world’s top SaltStack experts, selected for their outstanding contributions across these areas:

  1. Thomas S. Hatch
  2. Gareth J. Greenaway
  3. Pedro Algarvio
  4. David Boucha
  5. David Murphy
  6. Craig Sebenik
  7. Alyssa Rock
  8. Shane Lee
  9. Nick Hughes
  10. Joseph Hall
  11. Alex Peay
  12. Megan Wilhite

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

Thomas S. Hatch

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Thomas S. Hatch is the original author of Salt and founder of SaltStack, the company behind it.

Under his leadership, Salt grew into a powerhouse for infrastructure automation. Even after SaltStack’s acquisition by VMware in 2020, Tom remains an active open-source innovator, co-hosting the Hacks Podcast and guiding Salt’s future.

Gareth J. Greenaway

Nationality: American

Gareth is a long-time core developer of Salt. He became a Salt Project maintainer at SaltStack and continued as a lead maintainer at VMware (now Broadcom).

Gareth has contributed extensively to Salt’s code and community for years, and he’s known for co-organizing the SoCal Linux Expo (SCaLE) and speaking on SaltStack internals. In 2025 he joined a stealth automation startup to further innovate Salt-based solutions.

Pedro Algarvio

Pedro Algarvio - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

Nationality: Portuguese

Pedro (aka “s0undt3ch”) is an exceptional Python developer and a Salt maintainer.

He was a pivotal Salt core engineer at SaltStack/VMware, known for improving Salt’s testing and release processes. Pedro has a decade of Salt open-source contributions and has guided projects like Salt-Cloud and the Extension Modules initiative. Based in Portugal, he’s an active blogger and open-source advocate in the Salt community.

David Boucha

Nationality: American

Dave (known as “UtahDave”) was a founding engineer at SaltStack who specialized in event-driven security automation.

He helped develop SaltStack SecOps, using Salt to automate compliance and vulnerability remediation. Dave is a prolific Salt educator (author of blog tutorials on Salt’s Jinja templating) and a familiar face from SaltConf demos. After VMware’s acquisition, he embarked on a new automation startup with Salt’s creator Tom Hatch to push the boundaries of infrastructure-as-code.

David Murphy

David Murphy - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

Nationality: American

David Murphy was a Salt maintainer for over 10 years, overseeing packaging and platform support.

Based in Salt Lake City, he ensured Salt ran smoothly on all OSes and led efforts like Tiamat (Salt’s all-in-one packaging system). David’s meticulous work earned him a reputation as the “stability anchor” of Salt – he handled countless bug fixes, CVE patches, and backports. In 2025 he retired from Broadcom, leaving behind a legacy of engineering excellence and a hardened Salt codebase.

Craig Sebenik

Nationality: American

Craig ran one of the world’s largest Salt deployments while at LinkedIn.

He co-authored Salt Essentials with Tom Hatch, documenting best practices for Salt at scale. Craig’s work showed how Salt could manage tens of thousands of servers in production, influencing many enterprise SaltStack adopters. Now based in California, he has shifted focus to reliability engineering and mentoring, but remains a respected voice on Salt’s design and use in massive environments.

Alyssa Rock

Alyssa Rock - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

Nationality: American

Alyssa served as SaltStack’s technical writer and community advocate.

She revamped Salt’s documentation, making it more accessible, and led initiatives to welcome new contributors. Alyssa organized docs clinics, ran the Salt Extensions Working Group, and was instrumental in communicating changes. Her upbeat, inclusive presence (often seen on Salt’s Slack/Discord) helped expand Salt’s contributor base. Alyssa now works in developer relations outside Salt, but her impact lives on in Salt’s much-improved docs and contributor experience.

Shane Lee

Windows servers deserve great automation too — that’s where Salt shines across platforms.

Nationality: American

Shane “Twangboy” Lee has been the go-to Salt expert for Windows support.

As a SaltStack engineer (now at Broadcom), he developed Salt’s Windows minion installer and modules, bringing Salt’s power to Windows servers. Shane joined SaltStack in its early startup days and stayed through the VMware era, contributing features like native Windows Service management and the salt-bootstrap for Windows. He frequently assists the community with Windows-specific issues and wrote many tips for running Salt in mixed OS environments.

Nick Hughes

Nick Hughes - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

Nationality: American

Nick earned the nickname “The Salt Guy” for his extensive community contributions. Formerly CEO of a Salt-based startup (EITR), he joined Salt Project as an engineer and quickly became lead of the Salt Extensions Working Group. Nick developed the Prometheus integration for Salt and has blogged about Salt automation on LinkedIn. A winner of multiple hackathon awards, Nick often gives talks on marrying Salt with Kubernetes and cloud-native tools. He exemplifies the modern Salt influencer: part engineer, part evangelist – and all passion for Salt’s open-source ethos.

Joseph Hall

Nationality: American

Joseph Hall was a senior SaltStack engineer and among Salt’s earliest contributors.

He literally wrote the book on SaltStack – Mastering SaltStack (Packt, 2015) – sharing advanced techniques to use Salt to the fullest. Joseph has touched all areas of Salt (from orchestrations to plugins) and is known for helping users on forums and StackOverflow. He continues to advocate for Salt in the DevOps community and currently develops cloud integration solutions, leveraging his Salt expertise.

Alex Peay

Alex Peay 1 - Best 12 SaltStack Experts for Smart Automation

Nationality: American

Alex is one of SaltStack’s co-founders and served as VP of Product.

While Tom Hatch provided the tech genius, Alex provided direction – he helped shape SaltStack Enterprise and SaltStack SecOps, translating open-source Salt into enterprise solutions. Alex frequently spoke at events about SecOps automation, and under VMware he continued as Director of SaltStack Product Management. In 2024, Alex departed to co-found a stealth startup (with fellow Salt alums) focused on next-generation IT automation. His blend of coding ability and product strategy has made a lasting impact on Salt’s commercialization and community.

Megan Wilhite

Nationality: American

Megan is a Salt Project core developer who helped modernize Salt’s codebase.

She is renowned for creating the “Salt Describe” extension that auto-generates Salt state files, making Salt easier for newcomers. Megan spent years at SaltStack/VMware focusing on quality engineering and new features, and in 2024 she joined NVIDIA to apply her Salt expertise to large-scale systems.

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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