Avinal Kumar
Software Engineer II (Team Lead) at Red Hat
Software engineer building cloud-native developer tools at Red Hat. Leading OpenShift Builds based on the Shipwright project. Google Summer of Code alumnus and mentor. Passionate about open source, GNU/Linux, self-hosting, and developer tooling.
Experience & Education
GNU Project
- Contributing patches to glibc — one of the most critical pieces of the GNU/Linux ecosystem, used by virtually every Linux distribution
- Working on bug fixes and improvements submitted via the Sourceware mailing list and reviewed by core glibc maintainers
Software Engineer II (Team Lead)
Oct 2023 — PresentBuilds for OpenShift & Developer Tools
- Leading the Builds for OpenShift team — managing a group of engineers, owning sprint planning, backlog grooming, and cross-functional alignment with product and QE
- Architecting and shipping features for Builds for OpenShift (based on the upstream Shipwright project) — from design proposals through implementation, testing, and GA releases
- Driving Tekton Results upstream as a maintainer — improving observability, long-term storage, and query performance for Tekton pipeline results at scale
- Representing the team in OpenShift-wide architecture discussions, coordinating with platform, CLI, and console teams on build-related integrations
- Mentoring junior engineers through 1:1s, design reviews, and pair programming sessions to grow team capability
Associate Software Engineer
Jul 2022 — Sep 2023Hybrid Cloud Engineering — Pipeline Service
- Built and maintained Pipeline Service — a multi-tenant SaaS pipeline platform leveraging kcp, Kubernetes/OpenShift, Tekton, and Argo CD for managed CI/CD
- Contributed to Tekton Results for efficient long-term storage of PipelineRuns and TaskRuns, improving query latency and reliability for large-scale clusters
- Maintained Source-to-Image (S2I) and Shared Resource CSI Driver components in OpenShift, triaging bugs and shipping quarterly releases
- Participated in on-call rotations, resolving production incidents across the pipeline stack and authoring runbooks for recurring issues
- Collaborated with upstream Tekton community on design proposals and contributed patches accepted into the core project
Software Engineering Intern
Jan 2022 — Jun 2022Pipeline Service Team
- Designed and implemented the Minimal Tekton Server (MKS) from scratch — a lightweight server that creates and manages Tekton resources on Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters
- Built the MKS CLI and MKS Dashboard in Golang, providing a developer-friendly interface for pipeline operations backed by Redis for state management
- Wrote comprehensive unit and integration tests achieving high coverage, following test-driven development practices across the full stack
Google Summer of Code Mentor
May 2022 — PresentMentoring & Open Source
- Mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2022 — guiding contributors on open-source license compliance tooling, code review practices, and upstream collaboration
- Helping students navigate the FOSSology codebase, define project milestones, and deliver production-quality patches accepted by the maintainer community
Google Summer of Code Student
May 2021 — Aug 2021Build System & CI/CD Modernization
- Migrated the entire build system from legacy Unix Makefiles to modern CMake — cutting build time from 10–15 minutes down to 5–7 minutes (2× improvement)
- Replaced Travis CI with GitHub Actions for the CI/CD pipeline — reducing CI run time from 1–2 hours to 20–25 minutes with parallel job execution and caching
- Refactored and fixed years-old unit and functional testing code across C/C++ and PHP, restoring test suites that had been broken or skipped for multiple releases
Developer Documentation
- Redesigned the developer and user documentation for Apache APISIX, improving information architecture and discoverability for a fast-growing API gateway project
- Created interactive Katacoda tutorials that guided users through real APISIX deployments, collaborating closely with the community and incorporating feedback from maintainers
SRIJAN, NIT Hamirpur
Hindi Head Editor
Feb 2022 — Sep 2022Led the Hindi editorial team for the college's literary and technical magazine
Executive Editor
Jul 2020 — Jan 2022Editorial work for the college's literary and technical magazine
Associate Editor
Jul 2019 — Jun 2020Associate editorial work for the college magazine
Hindi Editor
Nov 2018 — Jun 2019Hindi section editorial work for the college magazine
CSEC, NIT Hamirpur
President
Jul 2021 — Jun 2022Led the Computer Science Engineers Club — organized hackathons, workshops, and coding competitions
Coordinator
Sep 2020 — Jun 2021Coordinated events and activities for the Computer Science Engineers Club
Executive Member
Aug 2019 — Aug 2020Active executive member contributing to club events and technical initiatives
Volunteer
Jan 2019 — Jul 2019Volunteered for club events and technical workshops
Managing open-source communities, hosting webinars, workshops, and coding boot camps. Beta testing upcoming GitHub features and tools.
Java Software Developer
XResearch · Bengaluru, Remote
Inventory & Billing Management
- Designed and developed a full-stack Inventory and Billing Management application using Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, and Thymeleaf for a small-business client
- Implemented RESTful API endpoints for CRUD operations on inventory items, invoices, and customer records according to functional specifications
Guided beginners getting started with open source development
Participant
Script Winter of Code
Contributed to open source projects during the winter program
Contributed to VLC media player and related projects
VLC for Android Documentation
- Authored comprehensive documentation for VLC for Android using Sphinx and reStructuredText, covering build instructions, architecture overview, and contributor guidelines
- Produced step-by-step tutorials with annotated screenshots, making the project accessible to new contributors and end users alike
Certificate in Introduction to Quantum Computing with IBM Quantum
The Coding School
Volunteer
GNU/Linux Users Group, NIT Hamirpur
Open-source community at NIT Hamirpur — shared knowledge about GNU/Linux and FOSS
Volunteer
SPIC MACAY, NIT Hamirpur
Organized arts and culture events on campus
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur · Himachal Pradesh, India
CGPA: 8.45/10
Intermediate in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry
Sri Chaitanya Junior Kalasala
Matriculation
Simultala Awasiya Vidyalaya
Skills
Languages
Cloud & DevOps
Tools & Platforms
Leadership
Projects
Automated WakaTime GitHub Actions App
Automated WakaTime coding statistics update system using Python, Docker, and GitHub Actions. Generates colorful bar graphs of weekly coding activity in SVG format.
- 90+ stars on GitHub with 500+ active users worldwide
- Generates embeddable SVG charts from WakaTime API data
Blowfish
C++ implementation of the Blowfish and Blowfish 2 symmetric block cipher with tests and APIs. Drop-in replacement for DES or IDEA.
Xeus-BASIC
Jupyter Kernel for the BASIC language built using the Xeus Framework, C, and C++. Executes BASIC programs line by line in Jupyter Notebook.