Brad Topol

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of AI and Cloud Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate. In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities. He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several AI and cloud-native open source technologies including PyTorch, KubeFlow, KServe/ModelMesh, Ray, Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, and Operator Framework. He also serves as IBM’s LF AI & Data Governing Board Member, and as a CNCF alternate Governing Board Member. Additionally, he serves as a member of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing Advisory Board. As well as leading a large team, Brad has twelve years of experience contributing to open source projects and previously served as an Open-Telemetry, Kubernetes, and Operator SDK contributor, and as a Kubernetes Documentation Maintainer emeritus and a Kubernetes SIG Docs Localization Chair emeritus. Brad also meets with large companies and advises them on how to adopt open source. He is a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2021. In addition, he is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.