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 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.