cncf
TAG Workloads Foundation Tech Lead Nomination
Following the TAG Reboot Timeline, we are opening nominations for (3) Tech Leads for TAG Workloads Foundation. If this interests you, please review the information on TAG governance and responsibilities in the TAG Governance doc and the draft charter for the TAG. Then, if you're still interested - please post your bio below and confirm your interest in running for Tech Lead.
Election timeline: May 5: Nominations open for new TAG Technical Leads May 19: TOC Vote opens for initial TAG Technical Leads (3 per TAG) June 2: TOC Vote closes for initial TAG Technical Leads June 2: Initial round of newly seated TAG Technical Leads announced July 7: Nominations close for new TAG Technical Leads July 7: TOC and TAG Chairs Vote opens for new TAG Technical Leads (TAG Chairs only vote for their TAG TLs) July 28: TOC and TAG Chairs Vote closes July 28: Newly seated Technical Leads announced
NOTE: Timeline is subject to change; check the TAG Reboot Timeline issue for the most up-to-date information.
Once the initial leads are seated, we'll work on refining the charters and really get things going. :)
Links: TAG Restructuring Presentation - Feb 4, 2025 TAG Reboot Timeline Issue TAG Governance Doc Draft Charter
Hey,
I want to nominate myself as a TAG Workloads Foundation Tech Lead. Read more below.
Shabeeb Khalid is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at IQM Quantum Computers, where he develops scalable and secure infrastructure to support quantum computing platforms, working with HPC and other high-performing applications. With a decade-long experience in the IT industry, most of the time in DevOps, automation and cloud engineering, he has held key roles at Kuvera, Amagi, and HCL Technologies—driving improvements in automation, reliability, and deployment efficiency.
His technical skill set spans AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Jenkins, and Python, with strong expertise in CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code. Shabeeb holds a Diploma in Mechatronics and is pursuing a B.Sc. in Programming and Data Science from IIT Madras as part-time, blending a robust understanding of hardware with modern software practices.
He is also an active contributor to the open-source community, sharing tools and scripts that enhance DevOps and quantum tech workflows.
Hi @shabeebk - are you also nominating yourself for TAG Workloads Foundation tech lead? If so, please edit your comment!
Thanks @angellk. Corrected the comment. I chose two interesting TAGs to give nominations. 😊
Hi CNCF community,
I’d like to self-nominate to be a co-chair (preferred given my recent co-chairing experience) or technical lead of TAG Workloads Foundation. I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and share relevant work from the groups and projects I’ve been leading. Thank you for taking the time to consider my candidacy—I truly appreciate your support.
Bio: Yuan is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat AI. Previously, he has led AI infrastructure and platform teams at various companies. He holds leadership positions in open source projects, including Argo, Kubeflow, KServe, and Kubernetes. He's also a maintainer and author of many popular open source projects. In addition, Yuan authored three technical books and published numerous impactful papers. He's a regular conference speaker, technical advisor, leader, and mentor at various organizations.
I believe the future of foundational cloud native workloads is driven and inspired by requirements, use cases, and demands from AI workloads. I’ve witnessed a lot of excitement, innovations, and initiatives from the groups and projects I’ve been leading, including the following that are relevant to TAG Workloads Foundation:
- K8s WG Serving (serving, orchestrator, deployment, dynamic scaling): hardware-accelerated AI/ML inference and focus on solving novel challenges of compute-intensive online inference, including standardized benchmarking tool and gateway extension for inference.
- KServe (serving, serverless, orchestrator): standardized and production-ready inference platform on Kubernetes for both predictive and generative AI workloads.
- Kubeflow Trainer (batch, scheduler): distributed model training and fine-tuning on Kubernetes.
- Argo (orchestrator, batch, scheduler, CI/CD): workflow-engine and declarative continuous delivery for Kubernetes.
I’ve also been involved in a variety of CNCF events and activities, including:
- KubeCon and co-located events program chair:
- Program Chair of Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day (Europe, North America, China), 2024 - 2025
- Program Committee Member of KubeCon AI/ML Track (Europe, North America, China, Japan, India), 2024 - 2025
- Program Chair of Data on Kubernetes Day at KubeCon North America, 2023
- Regular speaker at KubeCon and co-located events (list of public talks)
- Mentoring CNCF projects: Kubeflow (2024 and 2020) and Argo (2022)
Super excited about this opportunity and I hope my experience can bring value to this group!
Best,
Yuan
Dear CNCF Community,
I am writing to express my interest and self-nominate for the Tech Lead role within the CNCF TAG Workloads Foundation Group.
I have been building cloud-native plumbing since 2014, starting with an internal bespoke container orchestration platform. Since then, I have continuously worked on container orchestration topics, including building an OSS pre-Kubernetes orchestration solution called Kontena before pivoting to Kubernetes and various Kubernetes distributions, most notably steering k0s from its inception to becoming a CNCF Sandbox project. Currently, I am a Senior Principal Engineer at Mirantis, focusing on the k0s distribution and its surrounding components. Ten years in the cloud-native space provides a strong understanding of the technology, its architecture, community collaboration, and the rapid evolution of foundational layers. This experience offers a practical, hands-on perspective encompassing both technical aspects and community dynamics.
As a frequent speaker at community events, I am passionate about advancing cloud-native technologies with the community and believe my expertise can significantly contribute to the group's goals. I’m no stranger to participating in working groups; in my previous life in the telco world, I participated in different working groups.
I am committed to fostering collaboration, driving technical initiatives, and supporting the growth of the TAG Workloads Foundation community. I am confident in my ability to lead (technical) discussions, facilitate collaboration, and ensure alignment with the TAG's and CNCF's overall vision.
Thank you for considering my nomination. Happy to provide any other info that would be deemed helpful.
Sincerely, Jussi
Dear committee, I’d like to self-nominate for the role of Tech Lead for the TAG Workloads Foundation. My name is Mauro Morales, a Guatemalan software developer currently living and working in Belgium, and I bring nearly two decades of experience in backend systems development, infrastructure engineering, and open-source communities.
I’m currently a Staff Engineer at Spectro Cloud and a maintainer of Kairos (CNCF sandbox project), a Linux-based OS for running Kubernetes at the edge. Earlier in my career, I worked at CodeShip CI/CD on their Rails backend and LXD container runtime and at SUSE as part of the BOSH team, where I helped build atomic, repeatable deployment pipelines for Cloud Foundry. These experiences grounded me in OS internals, container orchestration, and lifecycle automation, all key areas within the TAG’s scope.
In the CNCF ecosystem, I am involved in the Special Purpose Operating Systems Working Group (I was elected co-chair, but the reboot paused things — so here I am trying my luck again 🍀), where I focused on defining best practices for modern OS design in cloud native contexts. I also host the Cloud Native Community Group in Belgium, creating space for practitioners to collaborate and learn. These roles reflect my commitment not only to technical excellence but also to building bridges and fostering diverse, international communities.
I believe in the mission of the TAG Workloads Foundation: to reduce fragmentation and define common standards that help adopters succeed. As Tech Lead, I’d bring both hands-on technical experience and a collaborative spirit to help guide meaningful, inclusive progress across the ecosystem.
Thanks,
Mauro
I am honored to nominate myself as Co-Chair or Technical Lead of the CNCF TAG Workloads Foundation.
Hongcai Ren is a Senior Open-Source Engineer at Huawei Cloud. He has been deeply involved in cloud-native ecosystems since 2019 and has held leadership roles in critical CNCF projects, driving innovation in multi-cluster orchestration, workload management, and cross-project integration.
Key Contributions and Roles:
Kubernetes Ecosystem: As an approver for Kubernetes SIG Instrumentation and SIG Multicluster, he maintains and evolves foundational components for observability and distributed workload management.
- Served as approver for work-api, cluster-inventory-api, and custom-metrics-apiserver, advancing multi-cluster workload portability and metrics-driven automation.
- Launched kubernetes-sigs/cloud-provider-huaweicloud and kubernetes/autoscaler/huaweicloud to enable hybrid cloud integration.
Karmada Project Leadership:
- Maintainer since 2021, helping Karmada become the most popular multi-cluster orchestration platform, which now has been widely adopted for both traditional and AI workloads.
- Collaborated deeply with CNCF projects including Istio, Argo, Flux, Gatekeeper, and Kyverno to extend their capabilities to multi-cluster environments through technical integrations in service governance, GitOps workflows, and cross-cluster policy enforcement.
Technical Expertise: Authored Go Expert Programming, a widely recognized technical book that distills best practices for cloud-native development. CNCF Community Engagement: - KubeCon Program Committee Track Chair/Member, focus on selecting innovative and interesting topics for the events. - CNCF Ambassador: Promoted cloud-native adoption through workshops, KCD events, and mentorship programs. - Regular speaker at KubeCon since 2019
I am excited to bring my experience in running workloads at scale, particularly in multi-cluster environments, to the TAG Workloads Foundation. My work aligns closely with TAG’s technical focus areas—containers, schedulers, CI/CD, scaling, and multi-cluster orchestration. By leveraging my technical experience and community-focused mindset, I aim to support more projects and users, foster cross-project/cross-tag collaboration, and deliver value to the TAG and the broader CNCF ecosystem.
Good day.
I would like to nominate myself as a technical lead for the CNCF TAG Workloads Foundation.
I was serving as technical lead to TAG-Runtime in the past, and I would like to continue helping community and CNCF ecosystem to improve in the areas of more efficient usage of the hardware and performance optimizations for workloads.
Bio: Alexander is currently employed by Intel as Principal Engineer, Cloud Software, focusing on various aspects in Kubernetes: Resource Management, power and performance optimizations for workloads, container runtimes, Device Plugins and DRA for enabling hardware accelerators in the CNCF ecosystem. Alexander has over 25+ years of experience in areas of Linux distributions, SCM, Networking, Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Cloud Orchestration, Continuous Integration & Delivery. Alexander is an active member of Kubernetes SIG-Node, tech lead of CNCF TAG-Runtimes, co-chair of Container Orchestrated Device WG.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akanevskiy/
Hello All,
I would love to be considered for the Tech Lead role for the TAG Workloads Foundation. This is my bio.
Selvi Kadirvel is currently VP of Engineering at a Kubernetes AI Infrastructure startup, Elotl. She is a hands-on Individual Contributor, Tech lead and Staff engineer in the Kubernetes space for 10+ years. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Florida, USA (PhD thesis). Her distributed systems experience spans two decades in the fields of High Performance Computing, MapReduce and machine-learning for improved systems performance through anomaly detection and performance prediction.
Technical leadership and Development expertise
- Selvi’s work and research experience has spanned startups (Elotl, ContainerX), large enterprises (VMware, Cisco) and University Research Centers (University of Florida HPC Center, University of Florida Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab). LinkedIn Profile: Selvi
- Selvi is proficient in Golang and Python. Her most recent development contributions include:
- An open-source Generative AI stack for Question-Answering systems on Kubernetes: Gen-AI Infra Stack
- Hybrid cloud orchestration for multi-cluster Kubernetes environments: Multi-cluster Kubernetes Orchestrator
Research and Subject-Matter Leadership expertise:
- Selvi has received 200+ citations for 15+ research publications and US patents. Google Scholar profile.
- Selvi’s technical speaking engagements include: KubeCon AI Day (2025) Scalable and Observable RAG for Question-Answering in a Box, KubeCon AI Day (2024), Gen-AI at Scale: Simplifying Orchestration of Healthcare Applications Across Multi-Cluster Environments, KubeCon Data on Kubernetes Day (2023) Zero-Touch Fault-Tolerance for Cloud-Native Geo-Distributed Databases, Cloud-Native Rejekts (2023) The missing piece of your GitOps pipeline, AI and Infrastructure meetups at DataBricks, NetApp, Nutanix.
- Selvi has been in the technical review committee for multiple Computer Science conferences and journals including: IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGRID), International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), International Computer Science and Engineering Conference (ICSEC), etc.
With my hands-on expertise in Kubernetes, diverse experience in distributed systems, and customer-focussed leadership roles, I will be able to bring in the necessary technical knowledge and cross-functional coordination needed for this role.
Thank you for considering my nomination!
Regards, Selvi
Hello everyone,
I’d like to express my interest in serving as a Tech Lead or Co-Chair for the TAG Workload Foundation.
About Me
I’m currently a Staff Software Engineer at Broadcom, where I focus on the low level runtime functions of Kubernetes on Virtual Machines and enabling AI workloads on Kubernetes. I’ve previously been a maintainer for the Kubernetes subproject Kube-Proxy. Since KubeCon Paris 2024, I’ve been co-chairing Cloud Native AI Day, a co-located event at KubeCon, and have continued this role through the most recent edition in London. I’ve also served on the KubeCon Program Committee since 2023 and acted as a track chair during this time. Until the recent TAG reboot, I served as a Tech Lead for TAG Runtime. In that role, I worked closely with co-chairs and TOC members to evaluate new projects, offer technical guidance and contribute to the TAG’s strategic direction. Some of the initiatives I’ve led or contributed to include:
- Driving community outreach and awareness for TAG Runtime
- Shepherding the formation of the Special Purpose OS Working Group
- Leading the sandbox project review process
- Providing thought leadership within CNCF’s Working Group on AI
- Co-authoring the Cloud Native AI White Paper
- Participating in Domain Technical Review Process
- Hosting and contributing to TAG Runtime meetings and maintainer track sessions at KubeCon
- Offering hands-on technical feedback to project maintainers to help them navigate the CNCF landscape
- Mentoring community members to grow through the co-chair ladder of TAG Runtime
Why Me?
Having previously served as a TAG Tech Lead, I am deeply familiar with the structure, responsibilities and processes across TAGs and the TOC. This gives me a strong foundation and a unique advantage in adapting quickly to the novel, rebooted TAG model. My prior experience, combined with an ongoing commitment to community collaboration, positions me well to contribute meaningfully from day one. I remain deeply invested in the growth and evolution of the cloud native ecosystem and would be honored to continue that journey in this new leadership role. If given the opportunity to serve in this leadership capacity within TAG Workload Foundation, I aim to:
- Collaborate with the End User TAB to drive more engagement with end user entities
- Strengthen collaboration between the TAG, TOC, and other TAGs
- Identify and address technical gaps across projects under the TAG’s purview
- Establish relevant subprojects and initiatives aligned with TOC priorities
Thanks everyone for putting your nomination forward :) With the nomination period now closed, we're going to temporarily lock the issues just so it's clear that the nomination period is over. We'll reopen soon with updates. 👍
Announcing the Tech Leads for TAG Workload Foundations:
Alexander D. Kanevskiy @kad ad - Term length to be confirmed Hongcai Ren @RainbowMango - Term length to be confirmed Rajas Kakodkar @rajaskakodkar - Term length to be confirmed
Thank you all for volunteering.
We encourage continued participation from everyone. There's plenty to do and many opportunities to come.
Dear CNCF community,
I'd like to self-dominate for the role of TechLead for the Tag Workloads Foundation.
Let me briefly introduce myself first, I'm now the founding engineer of a stealth AI startup (will be published soon) focused on building ai agents for system optimizations, the founder of InftyAI, an open-source community committed to building solid AI infrastructures, Tech Lead for years in different companies, also an active opensource contributor.
I've been working with cloud native technologies for many years, from the user to contributor to maintainer, here're some work or projects I've been contributing to closely related to Tag Workloads:
- Kubernetes SIG-Scheduling maintainer for years (orchestration, scheduling)
- Kueue ex-maintainer, a kubernetes-native job queuing system (batch system, scaling, training)
- LWS maintainer, multi-node LLM inference framework (inference, training)
- llmaz maintainer , an easy to use, LLM-optimized inference platform (inference, serverless, scaling)
- Envoy AI Gateway contributor, help incubating the new gateway for AI workloads (gateway)
- Member of many other projects as well, Volcano, Karmada etc. (big data, multi-cluster)
- Developing AI agents (our main business) running on Kubernetes (agent)
- Maintaining https://awesome-llmops.inftyai.com/ as the landscape for LLMOps projects, a large part of them are running on Kubernetes
My past working experience is most around building projects, it can help me to make better technical decisions, and try to avoid fragmentations between different projects and establish standards across the community. I'm also a regular speaker in different conferences which I believe will benefit to growing the community.
Thank you for considering my nomination! No matter what the final result is, I will continue to contribute to the community. OpenSource wins!
Best, Kante
Hi everyone,
I would like to nominate myself as Tech Lead for TAG Workloads Foundation.
I have been involved in TAG Runtime since Kubecon NA Chicago, having served as TAG Runtime Co-Chair soon after as of March 2024. It was a privilege to serve the community in this role, helping TAG Runtime grow, engage with projects, and help provide opportunities for projects for greater awareness, technical guidance, Kubecon exposure, and navigating project maturity levels.
I did many things behind the scenes for TAG Runtime including:
- leading bi-weekly meetings
- reaching out to projects
- developing project review guidelines for TAG Runtime
- representing the TAG for project reviews providing feedback to TOC
- engaging in TOC meetings
- working with TAG Leaders to share project review responsibilities
- organize Kubecon project pavilion booth and talks
- Develop content for maintainer track talks, lightning talks to showcase the TAG but more importantly the projects under the tag purview
I spoke and attended each NA and EU Kubecon since being involved in the TAG leadership. I also served as Track Chair for the most recent Kubecon EU London.
While all of these TAG tasks are perhaps more organizational and less technical, I am inherently technical and fit well into a Tech Lead role. My day job is a Principal Architect at Akamai Cloud, where I lead technical direction for all of Akamai's Cloud Native offerings. I have been a software engineer for 25 years starting from Sun Microsystems working on Solaris kernel development, through a couple storage startups as part of the core development teams, and now at Akamai developing Cloud Native software, architecture, platforms, and managed services including LKE (Linode Kubernetes Engine), our internal Kubernetes platforms, and everything in between.
I hope to leverage my deep virtualization, containerization, and OS knowledge as Tech Lead for Workloads Foundation to help projects across the breadth of the TAG. My interests and expertise fits well into the Workloads Foundation TAG areas of responsibility. I hope to use my previous TAG experience, and technical details, to work with projects, engage at a low-level, bridging the technical and organizational aspects of the project lifecycle within the CNCF.
I am excited about the possibilities and hope to continue serving the CNCF and the amazing project communities!
Thank you for your consideration, Steve https://www.linkedin.com/in/srust-dev
👋 Hi everyone,
I would like to nominate myself for the Tech Lead position for TAG Workloads Foundation.
I'm currently a platform engineer at Giant Swarm for the past 4 years (although due to move to Monzo next month) and have been working with Kubernetes since 2016. Over that time I've had a focus on cloud-based Kubernetes, running on AWS and Azure, followed by core Kubernetes functionality and operation such as node OS configuration, container runtimes, autoscaling and similar. In more recent times I've been responsible for building out, operating and managing CI/CD tooling, platform and best practices to allow testing of Kubernetes clusters, app changes and various release engineering tasks. Throughout I've been able to contribute to a platform used by several large companies around the world and have been managing 100s of clusters through feature development, on-call support and advising on how best to leverage the platform for specific use cases.
Key contributions and roles
Image Builder Maintainer:
I'm currently a maintainer of the image-builder sub-project of the Kubernetes project (although due to step down as maintainer due to the job change). I have been working on building the community around the project and reviving what was a stalled project at the time. Along with my fellow maintainers we've managed to introduce support for new providers and operating systems, speed up the issue and PR handling processes as well as more regular releases.
Cluster API Provider AWS reviewer:
I've also previously worked as a reviewer for the cluster-api-provider-aws project and contributed to cluster-api in various ways.
CNCF Ambassador and Public Speaker:
I am a CNCF ambassador, for the past couple years, and how been active in giving presentations on core Kubernetes topics at conferences and meetups for several years now. I also manage a monthly newsletter, CloudNative.Now, where update on all the cloud native news, tools and changes in the past month.
Technical Expertise
Experience with Kubernetes in several different capacities ranging from app developer deploying microservices to clusters, an R&D-style role building out tooling and architecting best practices for an organisation and as an operator building and managing clusters on behalf of customer. Through all these roles I feel like I've been able to get a good grasp of the different aspects of Kubernetes and how different people work and interact with it.
I've worked with several CI/CD and deployment tooling that is popular in the cloud native space, including Tekton, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Flux, using them all in different capacities from internal use cases, personal projects and supporting customer workloads.
Goals
My goals, if chosen for the role, is to leverage my range of technical knowledge and experience over the TAGs focus areas - containers, CI/CD, scaling, OS, runtime, orchestration and deployment - to help drive innovation and standardisation across the CNCF projects and working groups. I hope to drive a more consistent approach to container management and deployment, and to improve the ease of adoption of these tools and practices.
Resources
- Blog
- Public Speaking Slides & recordings
Hello everyone,
I would like to nominate myself for the Tech Lead role for the TAG Workloads Foundation.
About Me
I am a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where I focus on multi-cluster workload orchestration and open source infrastructure in the cloud-native ecosystem. I have been the maintainer and community lead of Open Cluster Management (OCM) since its inception, now going on six years. In this role, I host weekly community meetings, office hours, lead collaboration calls, and support community users and contributors in Slack channels. My work in OCM is centered around scheduling, placement, and governance of workloads across many clusters, with a strong emphasis on API design, and cross-project integration.
Community Involvement and Contributions
Speaker at KubeCon, DevConf, Community Central, and Cloud Multiplier, often presenting on real-world challenges in multi-cluster workload management.
Kubernetes SIG Multicluster:
- Maintainer for cluster-inventory-api.
- Contributor to work-api.
- Author of the ClusterInventory/ClusterProfile API KEP for multi-cluster discovery and grouping.
- Author of the PlacementDecision API KEP for selecting workload scheduling targets.
Contributed to CNCF projects focused on application and workload delivery, highlights:
- Argo CD, and Argo CD Agent, Helm, Operator SDK.
- Collaborated with Argo Workflows maintainers on enabling multi-cluster execution scenarios.
- Collaborator on the Argo CD Agent project from its inception.
Why This Role
My day to day work and long term contributions are deeply aligned with the mission of TAG Workloads. I have helped shape APIs and tools that directly power workload orchestration at scale, and have built strong relationships across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems to support integration and interoperability. My open source leadership experience has been grounded in collaboration, long term support of community needs, and mentoring contributors across roles and backgrounds.
My Goals in TAG Workloads
- Help define and support common patterns and APIs for workload orchestration, scheduling, and deployment across environments and platforms.
- Strengthen collaboration between TAG Workloads, CNCF projects, and SIGs to reduce duplication and encourage alignment.
- Contribute technical guidance to emerging projects and drive consistent evaluation processes in line with TOC priorities.
- Support community growth by mentoring contributors and helping maintainers succeed in the CNCF ecosystem.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Mike Ng Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeshng
Thanks everyone for putting your nomination forward. With the nomination period now closed, we're going to temporarily lock the issues just so it's clear that the nomination period is over. We'll reopen soon with the election results.
Announcing the Tech Leads for TAG Workload Foundations:
Kante Yin @kerthcet - 2 year term Stephen Rust @srust - 1 year term
Thank you all for volunteering.
We encourage continued participation from everyone. There's plenty to do and many opportunities to come.