William Denniss

William Denniss is a Group Product Manager at Google where he works on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). He co-founded the Autopilot experience for GKE, building a fully managed Kubernetes platform that offers a complete Kubernetes experience without the overhead of managing the underlying compute nodes. A strong believer in open standards and open source software to drive the industry forward, his first project on the GKE team was to work with the Kubernetes community and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to create the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program to encourage broad compatibility among Kubernetes providers.

Joining Google in 2014, he first worked in the identity space, where his goal was to improve how users interact with identity systems on mobile devices. He wrote the best current practice OAuth for Native Apps, published as RFC 8252, and co-founded the open source library AppAuth for iOS, Android, and JavaScript to provide a common implementation of that best practice.

He enjoys learning through teaching and spends a good chunk of his spare time coding and iterating on various projects. If he has a device, he’s likely coding something for it, whether it’s a graphics calculator (in high school), a computer running Windows, Linux, or Mac (at various times), a PlayStation Portable (in the 2000s), or an iPhone (since the iPhone 3G). Eventually, projects required a server component, which first led him to deploy code on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) over a decade ago and sparked his interest to later work on Kubernetes when the opportunity arose, to help make life easier for developers with similar requirements.

His product management superpower is to be an avid user of the products he builds.