End User Technical Advisory Board

Principal Engineer at The New York Times, specializing in building and scaling internal developer platforms on Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies.I actively contribute to the tech community, frequently sharing insights at conferences like AWS re:invent, KubeCon, and KubeCrash. Also, I lead the organization of Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) New York and share his expertise on CNCF technologies through his blog at abebars.io

Alolita is an OpenTelemetry GC member, CNCF Observability TAG co-chair and CNCF Governing Board alternate board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability practice and contributes to open source and open standards in OpenTelemetry, Unicode, W3C and the Observability TAG.

As a founding member of the CNCF’s End User TAB, Alolita has facilitated participation and contributions by CNCF end user members. She has also promoted end user priorities to the CNCF TOC and Governing Board. Within her rich track record, Alolita has demonstrated a deep commitment to CNCF’s goals and initiatives. Alolita brings a wealth of experience from her board leadership roles in the industry. For example, she has served on the boards of the OSI, SFLC.in and Unicode Consortium. Alolita has also provided strong leadership for observability and search engineering at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

Ben is a Senior Staff DevSecOps engineer at Lockheed Martin, where he spearheads the development of innovative cloud-native platform architectures. With over a decade of experience in the Cloud Native landscape, Ben has established himself as a trusted expert in leveraging cutting-edge tools and technologies to drive business results in both commercial and public sectors. Before joining Lockheed Martin, Ben held key roles as a Principal Platform engineer and consultant at various commercial companies, where he refined his expertise in cloud-native technologies and developed a passion for delivering high-impact solutions.

As a Technical Lead at Lockheed Martin, Ben is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining a Kubernetes-based cloud-native platform that empowers all of the company’s business areas to deliver exceptional value to a growing customer base. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Colorado State University, providing a strong foundation for his technical expertise.

Outside of work, Ben values spending time with his family, including his wife and two children, in the beautiful state of Colorado. When he’s not working, you can find him mountain biking, exploring the outdoors, or enjoying the many recreational activities that Colorado has to offer.

Chad is the Chief Engineer for the Boeing Software Factory and a Technical Fellow. In these roles he drives the technical vision for how software is developed by thousands of engineers utilizing cloud native methodologies in a variety of highly regulated environments. As a DevOps enthusiast, he promotes the sharing of best practices around CI/CD.

When not working, Chad is an avid mountain biker.

Garry is a lead engineer at JPMorgan Chase, currently focusing on observability. He has over a decade of Python experience, and enjoys trying out other languages, learning fun things about statistics, and making bread in his spare time.

Henrik leads a Product Management team responsible for the Intuit core platform, where he defines the strategy and direction that has shaped Intuit’s cloud native platform based on CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, Prometheus, Argo (and many more!) that’s used by 7000 developers and serving over 100M users.

Being a passionate member of the open source community for almost 30 years, from Linux through OpenStack and Kubernetes, Henrik is currently focused on the Argo project as a core maintainer. He also represents Intuit across other committees, like the CNOE project and the broader Linux Foundation, where he shares experiences and best practices from Intuit’s use of open source, making sure end users are heard and their pain points understood.

He loves engaging with the community and has been a prolific speaker and event program committee member across ArgoCon, GitOpsCon, Kubecon over the years. A native of Sweden, earning his B.Sc in information systems from the University of Gothenburg, he now resides in California with his family.

Joseph is the Principal Product Manager at Adobe, leading the Ethos platform team focused on developer experience with cloud-native infrastructure, traffic engineering, and API gateways. His expertise has directly supported thousands of developers in creating scalable and resilient applications. With over a decade of deep involvement in the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems, Joseph currently serves as a Release Manager Associate within SIG-Release and has been a part of six Kubernetes release teams. Beyond his technical contributions, Joseph is dedicated to fostering diversity in tech. He actively mentors individuals from underrepresented groups, guiding them toward successful careers in open-source and technology sectors.

Katie is a cloud native leader, practitioner, and contributor, currently in a Senior Kubernetes Field Engineer role at Apple and a TOC for CNCF. As a cloud platform engineer, Katie has built the infrastructure for Conde Nast and American Express, gravitating towards cloud-native technologies, principles, and Kubernetes as the focal point. At CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), she was a Technical Oversight Committee member and led the CNCF End User Community. At present, Katie advises the Keptn startup and holds the Chief of Future Founders Officer (CFFO) position at OpenUK.

Recently, Katie released the Cloud Native Fundamentals course and led the creation of the CNCF KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) certification. Additionally, Katie is an active keynote public speaker, a #TechWomen100 winner, and a strong advocate for women in STEM.

Kenta Tada has worked as a Linux engineer and team lead for various organizations, specializing in Linux kernel tracing technologies and eBPF. He has contributed to the Linux kernel and the BPF Compiler Collection (BCC) to enhance kernel tracing infrastructure. He has also contributed to several CNCF-related projects, including serving as a reviewer for the system validator used in kubeadm preflight checks.

In 2023, he reviewed the Japanese translation of Learning eBPF, published by O’Reilly Japan. In 2024, he became an organizer of Cloud Native Community Japan (CNCJ), fostering open source culture in Japan. Additionally, he served as Co-Chair of KubeDay Japan 2024, playing a key role in shaping the event and promoting cloud-native technologies within the Japanese developer community.

Recognizing the growing importance of eBPF in cloud-native environments, Kenta founded the eBPF Japan Community for engineers across various industries to collaborate, share knowledge, and drive eBPF adoption in Japan.

Tech Fellow, Senior Principal Engineer, and technology leader responsible for cloud-native technical and solutions architecture. Designs, develops, and maintains the enterprise Kubernetes-based cloud-native platform at BlackRock. Runs the BlackRock Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

Ricardo leads the Platform Infrastructure team at CERN with a strong focus on cloud native deployments and machine learning. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a lead of the CNCF Research User Group. Prior to this work Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).