Originally posted on my Substack.
While my official two-year anniversary is just a few days away, Thanksgiving feels like the perfect time to express my gratitude for this journey.
I still remember coming across a job posting shared by Jeremy Eder in the Kubeflow Slack channel. It described everything I hoped to do next. That led to interview panels with amazing colleagues (Daniele Zonca, Edson Tirelli, Jessica Forrester, Antonin Stefanutti) and my manager Taneem Ibrahim for the first year.
I’m deeply grateful to the Red Hat leadership, John Graham, Sherard Griffin, Steven Huels, Taneem Ibrahim, Jennifer Albertson, Chris Wright, and Matt Hicks, for their incredible support and trust, and for giving me the opportunity to take on technical leadership role working so closely with the open source community.
A heartfelt thank you to my mentors: Daniele Zonca, Jessica Forrester, Jason Greene, and Adam Miller. My journey wouldn’t have been this fruitful without your support, guidance, and encouragement along the way.
Earlier this year, I was promoted to Senior Principal Engineer - a milestone made possible by the incredible mentors and colleagues who supported me along the way. I’m especially grateful to those who took the time to write thoughtful reference letters. Jeremy Eder, Carlos Costa, Mrunal Patel, Huamin Chen, Andrew Block, Vincent Caldeira, Adam Tetelman, Josh Bottum, Andrey Velichkevich, Carlos Eduardo Arango Gutierrez, James Wu, Johnu George
None of this would have been possible without my wife and our three wonderful kids. Thank you for being my foundation and inspiration.
To all the collaborators and partners in the open source community: thank you. Every conversation and collaboration has meant a lot.
The past two years have been the most fulfilling and accomplished in my career. Some highlights:
- Delivered sessions and keynotes in front of up to 9,000 audience; participated and organized panels; and served as co-chairs at major industry conferences.
- Co-founded and co-chaired Kubernetes WG Serving, WG AI Conformance, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) TAG Workloads Foundation.
- Represented Red Hat in Kubeflow Steering Committee and the LF AI & Data Foundation Technical Advisory Council.
- Became a maintainer and project lead of KServe and led successful transition to CNCF.
- Contributed to Llama Stack in collaboration with Meta, which led to organization-wide adoption.
- Served as a Staff Engineer in the technical leadership team, helping shape our technical strategy and product alignment.
- Published the State of Model Serving Communities newsletter, which fostered collaborations across internal teams. Now with over 1k subscribers externally.
- Filed 5 patent applications and published 10 blog posts.
- Received organization-wide awards such as the IBM Tech Leadership and Red Hat AI Engineering Jedi Award.
Time flies! Looking forward to many more years to come!
