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Welcome William Rizzo, New Kairos Maintainer

· 3 min read
Mauro Morales
Mauro Morales

We are happy to welcome William Rizzo as a new Kairos maintainer.

William is a CNCF Ambassador and Linkerd Ambassador, and he currently works at Mirantis as a Global Field CTO. He helps organizations design, build, and run platforms across edge, AI, and platform engineering. His background spans engineering, product ownership, pre- and post-sales, and consulting, with experience in HPC, storage, and large-scale distributed systems.

Open source and cloud-native communities are a major part of William's professional identity. He actively volunteers in several Cloud Native groups and helps organize KCD Netherlands. He also brings public speaking experience from community talks. He is a strong addition to the team, bringing years of experience in the field and a collaborative, community-first approach.

A milestone for the project​

William is the first Kairos maintainer from a different company than the original Kairos creators, and that is a meaningful signal for the ecosystem. It shows the value Kairos brings beyond its origins and highlights growing, shared ownership of the project.

This kind of external maintainer support is also one of the prerequisites for applying for CNCF Incubation, and it aligns with our commitment to keep building Kairos in the open.

As Kairos continues to grow and bring in external maintainers, we realized this was the right moment to strengthen and formalize our governance. We have introduced an auditable voting process using GitVote so that maintainer decisions are publicly recorded in GitHub. As part of this transition, the Kairos maintainers have formally ratified William's maintainer status under the new governance model through a recorded GitVote in issue #3855. This vote does not change William's role; it documents it in a way that is accountable and meaningful for both him and the community.

Why William joined​

William has been contributing to Kairos for some time and is especially excited by how immutability is foundational to the project. As a maintainer, he wants to help Kairos grow both technically and in visibility, so more organizations can adopt the platform successfully.

Focus areas​

William plans to start by owning kairos-capi and expand as he ramps up. His focus is Kubernetes integration and helping Kairos work effectively with it, while other areas remain with the existing maintainers.

Community talks and writing​

Here are a couple of examples of how William promotes Kairos. There are more, and some are variations of the same talk at different events.

How to connect​

  • GitHub: @wrkode
  • Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
  • CNCF Slack: Will-I-Am

Please join us in welcoming William to the maintainer team as we continue to grow Kairos in the open.