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Stephen is a Black engineering director and leader in open source communities.

He is Cisco’s first Head of Open Source, within the Emerging Technologies & Incubation division.
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 Chair for SIG Release, a Lead for WG Naming, and an owner of Enhancements subproject.

Across the wider CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) ecosystem, Stephen has the pleasure of being one of the Program Chairs for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference, a SIG Contributor Strategy Chair, and a maintainer for the Dex project.

He is a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 25 (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 multiple workstreams here 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.