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16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

techops - 16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

In today’s always-on tech landscape, TechOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) leaders are the unsung heroes ensuring our digital services run smoothly.

This curated list highlights the best global experts in TechOps/SRE who are active as of today. These individuals span diverse backgrounds – from open-source trailblazers and startup founders still hunched over code, to influential bloggers, big-tech infrastructure gurus, and even coding competition champions. Each has made a notable impact on reliability engineering, devops culture, and operations excellence:

  1. Mitchell Hashimoto
  2. Ben Treynor Sloss
  3. Mark Russinovich
  4. Solomon Hykes
  5. Charity Majors
  6. Matt Klein
  7. Kelsey Hightower
  8. Jessie Frazelle
  9. Liz Fong-Jones
  10. Niall Murphy
  11. Gene Kim
  12. Patrick Debois
  13. John Allspaw
  14. Brendan Gregg
  15. Julius Volz
  16. Colm MacCárthaigh

Now, let’s dive into what makes each of these TechOps/SRE luminaries stand out:

Mitchell Hashimoto

YouTube Video

Why I Left HashiCorp: Mitchell Hashimoto Speaks Out.

Nationality: American

Mitchell is a renowned open-source contributor and entrepreneur known for revolutionizing how developers manage infrastructure.

He co-founded HashiCorp in 2012 and created widely used DevOps tools like Vagrant, Terraform, and Consul that are now staples in cloud infrastructure automation. Mitchell’s area of focus is infrastructure as code and provisioning—enabling ops teams to treat servers and networks with the same versioned, automated approach as software code. As a startup tech founder who still codes, he has remained deeply technical even as HashiCorp grew into a major company. Hashimoto’s open-source contributions have earned him a large following in the ops community for simplifying complex tasks (e.g., spinning up dev environments or managing multi-cloud deployments).

He actively shares knowledge through conference talks and his GitHub, continuing to inspire the next generation of infrastructure engineers.

Ben Treynor Sloss

SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.

Nationality: American

Often called the “father of SRE”, Ben is the Google executive who coined the term “Site Reliability Engineering” and established Google’s first SRE team back in 2003.

Under his leadership as Google’s VP of 24/7 Operations, the SRE approach—“what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations”—became a cornerstone of how Google runs reliable services. Ben’s focus is on large-scale reliability and service uptime. His pioneering work institutionalized blameless post-mortems, error budgets, and other SRE best practices now emulated across the industry.

Despite being a tech executive, he remains a key thought leader in reliability engineering, frequently sharing insights on the evolving relationship between SRE and DevOps.

Mark Russinovich

Nationality: American

Mark is a legend in systems engineering and cloud infrastructure. Currently the CTO of Microsoft Azure, Mark guides the reliability and architecture of one of the world’s largest cloud platforms.

He first gained fame as co-founder of Winternals and creator of the Windows Sysinternals tools—indispensable low-level utilities like Process Explorer and Autoruns used by IT pros to troubleshoot systems. Mark’s focus within TechOps is operating systems and cloud-scale systems performance. At Azure, he’s known for pushing cutting-edge infrastructure innovations (from data center design to service architecture) to ensure Microsoft’s cloud is robust and secure. He’s also an author and popular speaker: his books and talks distill complex OS internals and cloud concepts for a broad audience.

Russinovich’s unique blend of hardcore technical skill and leadership in enterprise cloud make him one of the most respected figures in reliability engineering.

Solomon Hykes

16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

Nationality: French

Solomon is best known as the founder of Docker, the open-source container platform that transformed how we build, ship, and run applications.

He launched Docker in 2013 (originally as an internal project at dotCloud) and open-sourced it, sparking the modern containerization wave. Solomon’s area of focus is developer operations and container infrastructure. By making containers accessible, he bridged the gap between developers and ops—Docker became a fundamental TechOps tool for consistent deployments. Hykes later founded Dagger, a DevOps startup, continuing his pattern of hands-on coding and product creation. As a startup founder who still codes, he’s deeply involved in the architectural decisions of the tools he builds. His influence on TechOps is significant: technologies like Kubernetes (which orchestrates containers) exist thanks to Docker’s success.

Solomon remains an active voice in the open-source and DevOps community, advocating for better developer experiences in ops.

Charity Majors

Nationality: American

Charity is a high-profile TechOps influencer and startup CTO known for her outspoken advocacy of better monitoring and engineering culture.

As co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb (an observability platform), Charity pushes the envelope in modern monitoring and DevOps practices. Her focus is on observability and database reliability—she previously ran infrastructure at Parse and Facebook, and co-authored “Database Reliability Engineering” in 2017, distilling best practices for managing data stores at scale. Charity is a prolific blogger (on her site and Medium) and conference speaker, famous for her witty, no-nonsense takes on topics like on-call pain, service ownership, and deploying on Fridays. She embodies the startup tech founder who still codes, often sharing war stories of debugging live systems.

Her influence in the SRE community is significant: she has popularized concepts like “observability ≠ monitoring” and helped shape how engineers think about production excellence in the last decade.

Matt Klein

Nationality: Canadian

Matt is the creator of Envoy, a high-performance open-source service proxy that has become a backbone of modern cloud and service mesh infrastructures.

A software engineer by background, Matt developed Envoy at Lyft in 2016 to solve reliability and observability challenges in a microservices architecture. After open-sourcing, Envoy was quickly adopted industry-wide (including by projects like Istio) as a key layer for traffic management, load balancing, and monitoring. Matt’s focus is service reliability at the network level (L4/L7) – essentially, making sure that when microservices communicate, it’s done efficiently and resiliently. He remains the lead maintainer of Envoy and is deeply engaged in its community through the CNCF. Klein is also a candid tech blogger, writing about the realities of building and running distributed systems. By providing Envoy to the world, he’s equipped SREs and Ops teams with a powerful tool to increase uptime and traceability of complex apps.

Matt represents the open-source infrastructure innovator, someone whose code has massively improved reliability in the cloud-native era.

Kelsey Hightower

16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

Nationality: American

Kelsey is an influential tech educator and Google Cloud veteran who has helped tens of thousands of engineers learn modern infrastructure.

Until recently a Staff Developer Advocate at Google, Kelsey is famed for demystifying Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and SRE practices. His area of focus is cloud infrastructure and container orchestration. Hightower co-authored “Kubernetes: Up and Running”, and created “Kubernetes the Hard Way”, a widely-used open tutorial that teaches the inner workings of K8s. As a popular conference speaker and Twitter influencer, he’s known for making complex cloud-native concepts accessible – with a dash of humor. Kelsey embodies the tech community influencer category: he doesn’t just build systems, he teaches how to reliably operate them. His live demos (often done without slides) and community engagement have inspired many to dive into infrastructure-as-code, observability, and SRE.

Even after stepping back from Google, he remains a key voice in cloud DevOps, often advising startups and mentoring engineers.

Jessie Frazelle

Nationality: American

Jessie is a well-known open-source hacker and ops engineer who made her mark working on containers and cloud infrastructure.

As one of the early Docker core maintainers, Jessie helped build and harden the Docker engine that underpins containerization today. She later brought her container expertise to roles at Google Cloud, Microsoft, and GitHub, and is now at Oxide Computer Company building next-generation server hardware/software. Jessie’s focus is Linux containers, sandboxing, and operating systems – she has run containers on everything from desktops to mainframes, and even authored tools like dockerfilelint and a secure container runtime. In the TechOps world, she’s admired as a hands-on engineer who isn’t afraid to dig into the kernel or write assembly to optimize systems. Frazelle is also a prolific blogger, known for explaining low-level concepts and for her “Weekly Links” summaries on tech. As a prominent female engineer in ops, she’s an inspiration and mentor to many.

Her work ensures that the container and OS platforms we rely on are fast, secure, and a joy to use for operators.

Liz Fong-Jones

16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

Nationality: American

Liz is a renowned SRE and developer advocate who has been a champion for reliability engineering and labor ethics in tech.

Liz spent over a decade as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, where she led teams ensuring services like Google Ads stayed running. Now, as an advocate at Honeycomb, she focuses on observability and SRE best practices for the broader community. Liz’s expertise lies in production incident analysis, service level objectives (SLOs), and fostering sustainable on-call rotations. She co-authored chapters in the “Site Reliability Engineering” book and the follow-up “SRE Workbook,” sharing Google’s practices with the world. Beyond her technical contributions, Liz is a prominent blogger and speaker, who speaks up about inclusivity and mental health in ops.

Her blend of deep technical skill and community activism makes her a role model for many in the SRE field.

Niall Murphy

Nationality: Irish

Niall is a veteran Site Reliability Engineer and author who has helped define SRE practices at global scale.

An Irish engineer with a background in both startups and big tech, Niall was a founding member of Google’s Dublin SRE office and later led SRE teams at Microsoft Azure. He is perhaps best known as the lead editor of Google’s “Site Reliability Engineering” book (2016) – the influential public handbook on SRE principles and practices. Murphy’s focus is applying SRE methodologies (like SLIs/SLOs, automation, and risk management) in large organizations. At Microsoft, he worked to instill Google-grade SRE culture into Azure’s operations. He also co-edited the follow-up “The SRE Workbook,” compiling concrete exercises for implementing SRE. Niall frequently speaks about the evolution of SRE, the challenges of reliability at cloud-provider scale, and how to adapt SRE to new domains.

With one foot in hands-on ops and another in writing/teaching, he stands out as an SRE thought leader making reliability concepts accessible and actionable for engineers worldwide.

Gene Kim

Nationality: American

Gene is a thought leader in DevOps and IT operations who has played a pivotal role in spreading modern TechOps philosophies.

He’s not a traditional SRE in the trenches, but as an author and researcher, Gene’s impact on ops teams globally is undeniable. His focus area is DevOps culture and IT performance. Gene co-authored “The Phoenix Project”, the famous 2013 DevOps novel that used a fictional narrative to illustrate the challenges of IT ops and the power of DevOps principles. He also wrote “The Unicorn Project” and the non-fiction “Accelerate,” which used research to identify what makes high-performing ops and dev teams. Earlier in his career, Gene co-founded Tripwire, an early IT security/configuration company. Today he runs IT Revolution and organizes the DevOps Enterprise Summit, helping enterprise companies modernize their TechOps practices.

Gene Kim is the quintessential DevOps influencer/author, distilling and disseminating the lessons from top performers to the broader industry.

Patrick Debois

16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

Nationality: Belgian

Patrick is often referred to as the “Godfather of DevOps”. In 2009, he famously helped coin the term “DevOps” by organizing the first DevOpsDays conference in Ghent, igniting the global DevOps movement.

Patrick’s background was in system administration and agile development, which led him to focus on bridging the gap between development and operations. His contributions are more cultural than code – he evangelized collaboration, Infrastructure as Code, continuous delivery, and monitoring as essential parts of the DevOps toolkit. Debois continues to be an active influencer in TechOps: he has served as an advisor and practitioner in areas like cloud architecture and security (he’s been involved with DevSecOps and is active with the security company Snyk). Through countless talks, community events, and tweets, Patrick shares practical insights on improving reliability by breaking silos between teams.

He exemplifies the community influencer category, as someone who sparked a fundamental shift in how we do Ops and continues to guide it more than a decade later.

John Allspaw

Nationality: American

John is a pioneer of modern web operations and resilience engineering. He gained prominence as the CTO of Etsy (and previously an engineering leader at Flickr), where he championed deploying code “10+ times a day” in the early 2010s – a radical practice at that time.

John’s focus is on resilience engineering, incident analysis, and DevOps culture. His 2009 Velocity Conference talk “10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” (with Paul Hammond) was a seminal moment in DevOps, showcasing how tight cooperation between devs and ops enabled high deployment frequency without sacrificing reliability. At Etsy, Allspaw implemented blameless post-mortems and metrics-driven ops, which became models for the industry. He later co-founded Adaptive Capacity Labs, where he researches and consults on incident response and human factors in outages. John is also an author of books like “The Art of Capacity Planning” and “Web Operations”.

As an influencer and consultant, he continues to push TechOps toward deeper understanding of system failures and resilience beyond just tools and automation.

Brendan Gregg

Nationality: Australian

Brendan is a top expert in systems performance engineering and observability. Currently a Fellow at Intel (after several years as a senior performance engineer at Netflix), Brendan has dedicated his career to understanding and improving how systems behave at scale.

His focus area is Linux kernel performance, profiling, and tuning – essentially, making the guts of operating systems and cloud instances run faster and more reliably. Brendan created the concept of flame graphs for visualizing performance hotspots, an invention adopted widely in SRE and ops teams to troubleshoot latency issues. He has authored influential O’Reilly books like “Systems Performance” and “BPF Performance Tools”, which are go-to references for low-level performance tuning. In the open-source realm, Gregg has contributed tools and extended frameworks like DTrace and eBPF for observability. He’s a frequent conference speaker sharing eye-opening analyses of OS internals.

Few people can match Brendan’s depth in performance analysis – he empowers SREs to solve the thorniest reliability issues by understanding what’s happening in the kernel and hardware.

Julius Volz

16 Elite TechOps Experts You Can Rely On

Nationality: German

Julius is a prominent open-source contributor in the monitoring realm and co-creator of Prometheus, the monitoring system that has become a cornerstone of SRE toolchains.

Julius was a Google SRE who in 2012 joined SoundCloud in Berlin, where he helped develop Prometheus to meet SoundCloud’s monitoring needs. Prometheus introduced a new way to collect and query metrics, and it was open-sourced in 2015, later becoming a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. Julius’s focus is observability and metrics – building tools that help engineers measure and assure reliability. He currently runs PromLabs, a company devoted to Prometheus training and tooling, staying very much a hands-on engineer. Volz has contributed countless lines of code and docs to the Prometheus ecosystem and travels the world to speak at meetups and KubeCon/PromCon events.

By providing a tool to effectively alert on and analyze system behavior, he empowered SRE teams to maintain service health. Julius is the archetype of the open-source SRE tool builder, whose work has been adopted by tens of thousands of organizations.

Colm MacCárthaigh

Nationality: Irish

Colm is a leading expert in cloud infrastructure and security at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, Colm has been the brain behind many of the foundational technologies that keep AWS reliable and secure. His focus areas include distributed systems networking and cryptography in cloud environments. For example, he was a key contributor to AWS’s in-house TLS implementation s2n (an open-source TLS library) and has worked on the design of AWS’s global networking (like the high-performance “AWS Nitro” system for EC2 virtualization). MacCárthaigh is also known in the open-source world from earlier in his career, when he contributed to the Apache web server project and other tools. In the TechOps community, Colm is respected for his ability to solve hard problems at massive scale – whether it’s designing a more secure protocol or ensuring AWS data centers have redundant, high-speed connections.

He frequently shares deep-dive technical knowledge at AWS Re:Invent and on social media, embodying the big tech infrastructure engineer pushing cloud reliability forward.

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. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

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