Kinvolk welcomes Sayan and Marga to the team

Today we would like to welcome Sayan Chowdhury and Marga Manterola to Kinvolk, where they start on the team building Flatcar Container Linux. We look forward to them adding to the project their wealth of experience in building and maintaining Linux distributions.

Both have not only been active contributors to many open source projects, but have also played key roles in organizing events and driving engagement in their respective communities. These traits are something we at Kinvolk cherish and try to embody as a team.

Without further ado, let’s introduce the new Volk.

Sayan Chowdhury

Sayan joins us from Bangalore, India. He brings 7 years of industry experience, working on various open source projects in multiple areas.

Sayan started his career at HackerEarth back in 2013, joining as the first engineer on the team. He helped the team scale the infrastructure supporting from 3k to a million users. He also built the HackerEarth Sprint platform end to end.

Sayan has been a long-time contributor to the Fedora Project, working on projects maintained by the Fedora Infrastructure team, and later joining the Fedora team at Red Hat in 2015 to contribute full time. As a part of the team, he worked with building projects to support the Fedora Atomic release pipeline. He was also responsible for maintaining the pipeline for the Fedora images on various cloud providers. Later, Sayan moved to the Red Hat CoreOS team, to work on releasing Fedora CoreOS.

He joins Kinvolk’s OS & Security team to help streamline the release of Flatcar Container Linux, and ship more exciting features to the product.

Marga Manterola

Joining us from Munich, Germany, Marga adds yet more Linux expertise to our teams.

A Debian Developer and Open Source enthusiast, Marga has been working with Linux for over 15 years. Back in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina, she led a large migration to Linux and open source tools. Doing this job, she learned to navigate the tricky line between satisfying user needs and keeping the software stack in good shape.

For the past 7 years, she’s worked as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, in the team maintaining the internal Linux distribution used by Google engineers. There, she led the development of many automation tools, allowing the team to keep tens of thousands of computers updated and secure. She’s grown used to thinking about large scale issues and focusing on the most impactful things to automate.

She joins Kinvolk as a Staff Software Engineer, and will help bring more automation to the Flatcar Container Linux build and test infrastructure.