Aakash is a seasoned Engineering Leader with experience being thrown into some of the most complex implementations with their “hair on fire”. He is able to broker trusted relationships, coupled with a strong executive presence to influence how to build world-class product experiences through one honest truth - our collective experiences. Having the opportunity to work across many industries like Retail, Healthcare and Financial Services, Aakash has led the innovation and experimentation of many modern practices that help create a safe environment for cross-functional engineering teams to deliver high quality features regularly. Aakash is always focused on taking a data-driven approach, learning from what has worked and what has failed. He solemnly believes that everyone in an organization is capable of delivering great outcomes and focuses on enabling accountable and nimble teams.

Alayshia Knighten has many years of experience in the DevOps realm. Alayshia specializes in enhancing technical and team-related experiences while educating customers on their journey with and beyond security. In her words, “Getting ish done while identifying how to accelerate at the person beyond the tooling is the real meat and potatoes.” She enjoys solving the “so, how do we solve that?” problems and meeting people from all walks of life. Her tiny hometown and Southern background inspire Alayshia. She enjoys hiking, grilling, painting, and making random bird calls with her father in her spare time.

From film to engineering, Annie's career has seen many iterations. She is a keen observer of what works and what doesn't, striving always to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. Annie and her husband, Michael, are raising their three teenagers in Boulder, CO. She's currently working on a project to make doing the right thing with your career the easy thing to do. Find out more at people-work.io.

Member of the DevOpsDays community since 2011. Over the years, I've attended more than 20 DevOpsDays conferences and spoken at events in Los Angeles, Austin, Santa Clara, Buffalo, and other locations.

Chris Maj is quick to answer the phone after twenty years of exploring telecommunications, programming dial plans, and satisfying customers in the Voice over Internet Protocol space. Last year, Chris joined the steady hands on deck at Sangoma as the Open Source Solutions Advocate, helping to lead Open Source development and community engagement inside both the Asterisk project and the FreePBX project code repositories. While inside, he's probably standing at his desk; outside, you might catch him running, biking, hiking, skiing, frolfing, pickling or fishing.

Education engineer at HashiCorp

I'm a local DevOps engineer trying to apply best practices at all scales.

I've worked at very small companies and very large, and I'm excited by the amount of opportunity this skillset provides for making change.

Han Xu is a software engineer at Amazon and a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Senior DevOps engineer at Walmart focused on building K8s based platform for cloud agnostic and gitops based infrastructure.

Kat leads the Developer Relations team at PagerDuty. She enjoys talking and thinking about incident response and incident management based on 11+ years in the field, as well as customer support, healthy communication, and automating the creation of a delightful end-user and employee experience. In her spare time, Kat is a mediocre plant parent and a slightly less mediocre pet parent to her two rabbits, Lupin and Ginny.

In my sordid career, I have been an actor, bug exterminator and wild-animal remover (nothing crazy like pumas or wildebeests. Just skunks, snakes, and raccoons.), electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, ASL interpreter, and Sunday school teacher. Oh, yeah, I've also worked with computers.

While my first keyboard was an IBM selectric, and my first digital experience was on an Atari 400, my professional work in tech started in 1989 (when you got Windows 286 for free on twelve 5¼” when you bought Excel 1.0). Since then I've worked as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, helpdesk operator, desktop support staff, sysadmin, network engineer, and software distribution technician.

Then, about 25 years ago, I got involved with monitoring. I've worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, BMC, OpenView, janky perl scripts, Nagios, SolarWinds, DOS batch files, Zabbix, Grafana, New Relic, and other assorted nightmare fuel. I've designed solutions for companies that were modest (~10 systems), significant (5,000 systems), and ludicrous (250,000 systems). In that time, I've learned a lot about monitoring and observability in all it's many and splendid forms.

Luke Philips is a Staff Engineer and Software A̶r̶c̶h̶i̶t̶e̶c̶t̶ Custodian. Trying to sweep together the best ideas from all sources. Previously of the New York Times, and a long career in Telecom at Charter, CenturyLink, and Level 3 Communications. With a mixed focus on continuous delivery, orchestration solutions, enterprise, Kubernetes, open source, networking, and cloud-native technologies. On the side Luke dabbles in Wardley Mapping and strategic proficiency.

Maciej is a Cybersecurity Platform Architect (not his idea of a job title) at the Cybersecurity Center at MSU Denver. He spends most of his time building systems that give students real, hands-on experience with cybersecurity tools. He also runs workshops on Docker and containerization, and helps lead the CS² Community, a space where students get support and encouragement as they contribute to open source projects.

Mark has been working in software for 30+ years. Mark is currently a Principal Engineer at Cisco. He works primarily on data pipelines for Generative AI and ML systems. Prior to Cisco, Mark was building GitOps tooling for Kubernetes at Weaveworks. Prior to Weaveworks, Mark was the founder of a company within CA Technologies' Accelerator program named Yipee.io that created a visual modeling tool for microservice applications. He is passionate about leadership, team dynamics, innovation, and productivity. Mark lives in Monument CO with his wife and three dogs. When he isn’t working you'll find Mark learning about new technologies or most likely outside running or biking.

Cybersecurity enthusiast with experience in vulnerability management, application security, and secure software development. CTF player in my free time. I have security certifications such as eJPT, eWPT, eWPTX and CEH.

Sean is the Director of Compute & Cloud at Datadog. His teams are responsible for managing tens of thousands of kubernetes nodes, hundreds of clusters, and the tooling to manage cloud resources across multiple providers.

Throughout his career Sean has walked the line between product and infra including running the Datastore infra team and APM product team at Datadog, running the Backend engineering and DevOps teams at Bitly, and helping build multiple early stage startups.

Sean is based in Denver, CO.

Shivani Shukla is an Engineering Manager for Platform and Cloud Engineering at Apex Fintech Solutions. With a strong background in cloud infrastructure, DevOps and development, she leads initiatives to enhance platform scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency in highly regulated environments. Her approach to platform engineering is shaped by years of hands-on experience building cloud-native systems at hyper scale, and she brings that same rigor to helping teams balance velocity with visibility.

Shivani is a frequent speaker on topics like developer platforms, platform as a product, scaling DevOps practices across organizations, and cloud cost culture. She’s passionate about mentorship, technical leadership, and creating engineering cultures where people—and platforms—can thrive.

I am a Software Development Engineer with 8 years of experience in the tech industry. My expertise lies in building health tech enterprise-grade software solutions, with a focus on designing scalable architectures, ensuring robust security, and maintaining high coding standards. I have hands-on experience implementing advanced security mechanisms, integrating diverse technologies, and optimizing system performance to deliver reliable and efficient health tech software products.

As a core member of the team that built Amazon Pharmacy, I was deeply involved in developing the health tech platform from scratch, addressing complex challenges in healthcare compliance, data security, and system scalability. My work contributed directly to a smooth and successful launch, with exceptional customer acceptance and operational stability. I am passionate about leveraging technology to solve real-world problems and am dedicated to building innovative solutions that meet the highest standards of quality and security in the health tech domain.

Whitney is a kind and welcoming human who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, she has created and delivered two KubeCon keynotes, a VMware Explore keynote, and countless fun, funny, and informative community conference keynotes. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on her YouTube channel, she co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! - a 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure'-style journey through the CNCF landscape, she is one of the hosts of Cloud Native Live on the CNCF YouTube channel, and she co-hosts the podcast Software Defined Interviews. Whitney is a Senior Technical Advocate at Datadog.