The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community.
The TOC functions include:
- Defining and maintaining the technical vision for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- Approving new projects and creating a conceptual architecture for the projects
- Aligning projects and removing or archiving projects
- Accepting feedback from end user committee and mapping to projects
- Aligning interfaces to components under management (code reference implementations before standardizing)
- Defining common practices to be implemented across CNCF projects
You can review the TOC activity and upcoming schedule, join the mailing list or view the election schedule.
TOC Representatives
(He/Him)
Adobe Inc
TAB Vice Chair
Joseph Sandoval
(He/Him)
Adobe Inc
- Location: Pollock Pines, California, United States
- Languages: English
- Project Experience: Cilium, Envoy, Kubernetes, Prometheus
I’m Joseph Sandoval, a Principal Product Manager at Adobe, where I lead product strategy for our internal developer platform. I’ve been in tech for over 25 years, working across large-scale infrastructure, DevOps, and site reliability engineering. I became an early Kubernetes end user back in 2013, before the 1.0 release, and I’ve been passionate ever since about helping others adopt and succeed with cloud native technologies.
I currently serve as co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Board and as a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair for Atlanta 2025. Before that, I was part of the Kubernetes SIG Release team. These days, my focus is on AI and machine learning workloads and building agentic experiences both on our platform and for Adobe’s users. You’ll often find me at CNCF and AI/ML community events in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I love connecting with practitioners, sharing what I’ve learned, and supporting others in their cloud native journey.
(He/Him)
The New York Times
Ahmed Bebars
(He/Him)
The New York Times
- Location: East Brunswick, NJ , United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, Envoy, Istio, KEDA, Kubernetes
Principal Engineer at The New York Times, specializing in building and scaling internal developer platforms on Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies.I actively contribute to the tech community, frequently sharing insights at conferences like AWS re:invent, KubeCon, and KubeCrash. Also, I lead the organization of Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) New York and share his expertise on CNCF technologies through his blog at abebars.io
Alex Chircop
Principal Engineer at Google Cloud. Member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Previously Chief Architect at Akamai Cloud and founder and CTO of Ondat (formerly StorageOS), building software defined solutions for cloud native environments, and a co-chair of the CNCF Storage TAG. Before embarking on the startup adventure he spent over 25 years engineering infrastructure platforms for companies like Nomura and Goldman Sachs.
(He/Him)
Defense Unicorns
Brandt Keller
(He/Him)
Defense Unicorns
- Location: Seattle, United States
- Project Experience: Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Passionate about Open Source, mentorship, and community building through engagement with diverse groups and perspectives. Member of TAG Security and multiple CNCF working groups. Currently specializing in cloud native policy and compliance.
Boeing
Chad Beaudin
Boeing
Chad is the Chief Engineer for the Boeing Software Factory and a Technical Fellow. In these roles he drives the technical vision for how software is developed by thousands of engineers utilizing cloud native methodologies in a variety of highly regulated environments. As a DevOps enthusiast, he promotes the sharing of best practices around CI/CD.
When not working, Chad is an avid mountain biker.
(She/Her)
Ericsson Software Technology
Faseela K
(She/Her)
Ericsson Software Technology
- Location: Aachen, Germany
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Envoy, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes
Faseela is a cloud-native developer, maintainer and steering committee member at Istio Service Mesh. She has served as the Program Chair for the Istio Meetups in 2023 including the IstioDays co-located with KubeCon Europe and NorthAmerica. She regularly contributes to the Istio blogs, helping all the latest news about Istio reach users and contributors worldwide.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Having done the work of an ambassador for Istio for several years now, I look forward to continuing this work officially now, making use of the support CNCF provides. I would love to provide more support for the women in cloud native community with this new opportunity I am provided with.
(He/Him)
Microsoft
Jeremy Rickard
(He/Him)
Microsoft
- Location: Colorado Springs, CO, United States
- Languages: English
- Project Experience: Kubernetes
Jeremy Rickard is a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and a principal engineer on the Azure Core Upstream Team at Microsoft. He is also a Kubernetes sig-release chair and was previously the release lead for Kubernetes 1.20. Jeremy holds a bachelors degree from the University of Maryland and a masters degree from Johns Hopkins University. Jeremy is an avid runner and coffee drinker.
(She/Her)
TOC Chair
Red Hat
Karena Angell
(She/Her)
TOC Chair
Red Hat
Karena Angell is a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and was a Technical Lead for the CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) App Delivery. She is also a Senior Principal Technical Product Manager at Red Hat focused on upstream projects, including Kubernetes. She has a broad background within various disciplines including Product Management, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Solution design and management, Marketing, IT Service Management and technical community building. She has also worked extensively within Commercial and Government enterprises. These experiences give her a unique understanding of how to guide strategic efforts to engage community members and drive increased CNCF involvement.
(She/Her)
TOC Shadow (GB)
Apple
Katie Gamanji
(She/Her)
TOC Shadow (GB)
Apple
Katie is a cloud native leader, practitioner, and contributor, currently in a Senior Kubernetes Field Engineer role at Apple and a TOC for CNCF. As a cloud platform engineer, Katie has built the infrastructure for Conde Nast and American Express, gravitating towards cloud-native technologies, principles, and Kubernetes as the focal point. At CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), she was a Technical Oversight Committee member and led the CNCF End User Community. At present, Katie advises the Keptn startup and holds the Chief of Future Founders Officer (CFFO) position at OpenUK.
Recently, Katie released the Cloud Native Fundamentals course and led the creation of the CNCF KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) certification. Additionally, Katie is an active keynote public speaker, a #TechWomen100 winner, and a strong advocate for women in STEM.
(He/Him)
TOC Vice Chair
Huawei
Kevin (Zefeng) Wang
(He/Him)
TOC Vice Chair
Huawei
- Location: Hangzhou, China
- Project Experience: Karmada, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, Volcano
Kevin Wang has been an outstanding contributor in the CNCF community since its beginning and is the leader of the cloud native open source team at Huawei. Kevin has contributed critical enhancements to Kubernetes, led the incubation of the KubeEdge, Volcano, Karmada projects in CNCF, actively participated in the TOC, and played a critical role in building and supporting the growth of CNCF technologies and the CNCF community in the globe.
(He/Him)
Kubermatic
Mario Fahlandt
(He/Him)
Kubermatic
- Location: Schirnding Germany
- Project Experience: containerd, Dex, Jaeger, k8gb, Knative, Kube-OVN, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Tinkerbell, zot
Mario is from a small village in Germany and working for Kubermatic. He studied creative media at an English university and moved his field of knowledge to Cloud Native Infrastructure. He is working as a Customer Delivery Architect with the focus on planning and building concepts and architecture for Infrastructure in the cloud native world. Furthermore, he started the Google Developer Group for Cloud in Munich back in 2016. His passion is always to move the cloud native community one step forward. He is part of the Kubernetes SIG ContribEx and helps in the SIG K8s Infra with reporting.
(He/Him)
Mauricio Salatino
(He/Him)
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, Crossplane, Dapr, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, OpenFeature, OpenFunction, Operator Framework
I am an Open Source Software Engineer at @Diagrid, contributing to and driving initiatives for the Dapr OSS project. I also serve as a Steering Committee member for the Knative Project, and I am Co-Leading the Knative Functions initiative. I’ve been writing on my blog, salaboy.com for over 15 years and I just published a book titled Platform Engineering on Kubernetes for Manning. I previously worked at VMware and Red Hat, building tools to help developers be more productive.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been working on Cloud Native and CNCF communities for over seven years now, and I’ve been constantly trying to give back and connect people who share the same interests around open source projects. Being an ambassador allows me to expand my network to keep connecting, mentoring, and guiding community members to grow.
(He/Him)
TOC Shadow (GB)
Snowflake
Ricardo Aravena
(He/Him)
TOC Shadow (GB)
Snowflake
- Location: United States
- Project Experience: containerd, Helm, k3s, KServe, Kubeflow, Kubernetes
Ricardo is a Cloud Native AI Lead at Snowflake. He’s an open source enthusiast, co-chairing the CNCF TAG-Runtime, lead for the Cloud Native AI Working Group and CNCF Ambassador. Recently, he led the publication of the Cloud Native AI Whitepaper and is currently leading various initiatives in the Cloud Native AI Working Group. He has worked in tech and software engineering roles for over 25 years. He comes from a diverse professional background, having held different roles at large companies such as Rakuten, Cisco, and VMware and startups such as Truera, Branch Metrics and Coupa.