About

Nikhita Raghunath is a highly accomplished Staff Software Engineer at VMware, with a focus on Kubernetes, distributed systems, and open source. With over 5 years of relevant experience, Nikhita has made significant contributions to the Kubernetes community and has been recognized globally for her expertise. As a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee Emeritus, Nikhita has played a key role in overseeing the governance of the Kubernetes project. She has also been awarded the CNCF Top Committer award for technical contributions at KubeCon 2021, which recognizes excellence in technical contributions to CNCF and its hosted projects. Nikhita's past experience includes working as a Software Engineer at Kubermatic, where she was involved in the development of the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform. She played a key role in the development of all backend and Kubernetes-related aspects of the project, including cluster creation and lifecycle, controller setup, and the API. She also set up the internal CI/CD system using Kubernetes Prow for job execution for testing, batch processing, and artifact publishing. Nikhita has been featured in various press and media outlets, including being named "India's Best Programmer" in the Times of India and a "Top Developer" globally in Business Insider. She has also given multiple talks at conferences and meetups, including a keynote at KubeCon Europe 2019 with 8000 attendees. Nikhita holds a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering from VJTI. Her technical skills include Kubernetes, GCP, CI/CD, and backend development. With her extensive experience and expertise, Nikhita is a valuable asset to any team working on Kubernetes and distributed systems.