Stephen is a Black engineering director and community leader in open source, based in New York City.
He is the Head of Open Source at Cisco, working within the Corporate Strategy, Development, and Incubation (CSDI) organization.
Outside of managing Cisco’s open source strategy and a team of brilliant architects in Cisco’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO), Stephen participates in foundation-level governing boards (OpenSSF, CNCF, OpenAPI Initiative), project-level steering committees (Kubernetes, OpenSSF Scorecard, TODO Group), and helps maintain a few codebases around open source projects you may have heard of.
Additionally, he serves as an advisor and investor for startups in the open source ecosystem.
Within the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), he maintains OpenSSF Scorecard, a project that helps assess the security posture of open source projects.
For Kubernetes, Stephen serves as a Steering Committee member and a chair of SIG Release. He has co-founded transformational elements of the project, including the KEP (Kubernetes Enhancements Proposal) process, the Release Engineering subproject, and Working Group Naming. He has previously served as a chair of both SIG PM and SIG Azure.
Across the wider Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem, he is a former TAG Contributor Strategy Chair, Dex maintainer, and Program Chair for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference.
Stephen is a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, and is amongst the top 100 (as of writing) code/content committers since the inception of the foundation.
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.