Stephen Augustus

Stephen is a leader in open source communities and Cisco’s Head of Open Source.
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 TODO Group Steering Committee member, a maintainer for the Dex (CNCF) and scorecard (OpenSSF) projects, and an OpenSSF Governing Board observer.
Previously, he was 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 prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 30 (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 leads the Community/Open Source workstream and maintains the initiative’s infrastructure.

He has previously held positions at VMware (via Heptio), Red Hat, and CoreOS.
Stephen is based in New York City.