Stephen Augustus

Stephen is a Black engineering director and leader in open source communities.

He is the Head of Open Source at Cisco, working within the Strategy, Incubation, & Applications (SIA) organization.

For Kubernetes, he has co-founded transformational elements of the project, including the KEP (Kubernetes Enhancements Proposal) process, the Release Engineering subproject, and Working Group Naming. Stephen has also previously served as a chair for both SIG PM and SIG Azure.

He continues his work in Kubernetes as a Steering Committee member and a Chair for SIG Release.

Across the wider LF (Linux Foundation) ecosystem, Stephen has the pleasure of serving as a member of the OpenSSF Governing Board and the OpenAPI Initiative Business Governing Board.

Previously, he was a TODO Group Steering Committee member, a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) TAG Contributor Strategy Chair, and one of the Program Chairs for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference.

He is a maintainer for the Scorecard and Dex projects, and a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 40 (as of writing) code/content committers, all-time.

In 2020, Stephen co-founded the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a cross-industry group dedicated to helping projects and companies make consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language across codebases, standards, and documentation.

He has previously held positions at VMware (via Heptio), Red Hat, and CoreOS.

Stephen is based in New York City.