Brad Topol

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate. In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities. He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several cloud-native and AI open source technologies including Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, PyTorch, KubeFlow, and KServe/ModelMesh. In addition to leading a large team, Brad has personally served as an OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Operator SDK contributor, and is a Kubernetes Documentation Maintainer. Brad currently serves as IBM’s alternate representative on the CNCF Governing Board. He is a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2021. In addition, he is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.