Kevin Conner
Kevin Conner is a senior engineering leader with over 30 years of software development experience and more than 17 years of building and managing global engineering teams. He specializes in distributed systems, cloud technologies, and Kubernetes. His career began in the early 1990s as a kernel developer working on network and SCSI drivers for fault-tolerant telecommunications systems, progressed through enterprise Java development at Sun Microsystems and various financial institutions, and led transaction management systems development at Arjuna Technologies, where he contributed to OASIS WS-CAF specifications.
In 2005, JBoss acquired Arjuna Technologies' Transaction Management team along with Kevin. When Red Hat subsequently acquired JBoss, Kevin spent 16 years with the company, progressing from Core Developer to Senior Engineering Manager. He participated in standards work including the W3C WS-Addressing Working Group, served as Chair of the SPEC SOA performance Committee, and was a member of the JCP JSR-352 Specification Committee. He created and led the Cloud Enablement team that brought Red Hat's middleware products to OpenShift and Kubernetes, established the Istio team, drove the creation of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh and served on the Istio Steering Committee.
After leaving Red Hat in 2021, Kevin served as Vice President of Engineering at Aviatrix Canada, building teams from the ground up and growing his organization from sixteen to thirty nine engineers. He returned to Red Hat as a consultant in 2022 to work on software supply chain security, contributing to OpenSSF projects including GUAC and working with the CycloneDX community. At Getup Cloud as Chief Engineer, he led security solutions for Kubernetes environments, including the Zora project and Zero CVE solution, while representing the company at KubeCon and participating in the Kubernetes community.
Kevin rejoined Red Hat in 2025 as a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Trusted Artifact Signer team, where he focuses on productizing upstream sigstore projects, model validation for AI/ML workloads, and implementing support for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms within sigstore. He actively participates in the Kubernetes community through conference presentations and contributions to open source projects.
