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.

Avinal Kumar

Experience & Education

Work
May 2024 — Present

Contributor

GNU C Library · Remote

GNU Project

  • Submitting patches to the GNU C Library (glibc)
Work
Jan 2022 — Present

Red Hat

Bengaluru, India

Software Engineer II (Team Lead)

Oct 2023 — Present

Builds for OpenShift & Developer Tools

  • Serving as Team Lead for Builds for OpenShift — managing engineers, driving sprint planning, code reviews, and cross-functional collaboration
  • Working on Builds for OpenShift based on the upstream Shipwright project — designing, maintaining, and releasing build features
  • Maintainer of Tekton Results — contributing upstream to enhance observability and results storage for Tekton pipelines

Associate Software Engineer

Jul 2022 — Sep 2023

Hybrid Cloud Engineering — Pipeline Service

  • Worked on Pipeline Service — a SaaS for pipelines leveraging kcp, Kubernetes/OpenShift, Tekton, and Argo CD
  • Contributed to Tekton Results for long-term, efficient storage of PipelineRuns and TaskRuns
  • Maintained Source-to-Image (S2I) and Shared Resource CSI Driver components in OpenShift

Software Engineering Intern

Jan 2022 — Jun 2022

Pipeline Service Team

  • Designed and implemented the Minimal Tekton Server with unit tests — creates Tekton resources on Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters using the Tekton API
  • Built MKS Server, MKS CLI, and MKS Dashboard using Golang, Kubernetes, Tekton, and Redis
Work
May 2021 — Present

The FOSSology Project

Remote

Google Summer of Code Mentor

May 2022 — Present

Mentoring & Open Source

  • Mentoring GSoC students since 2022, guiding open source license compliance tooling projects

Google Summer of Code Student

May 2021 — Aug 2021

Build System & CI/CD Modernization

  • Upgraded the build system from Unix Makefile to CMake — build time reduced to 5–7 minutes (2× faster)
  • Migrated CI/CD from Travis CI to GitHub Actions — CI time reduced from 1–2 hours to 20–25 minutes
  • Refactored and fixed years-old unit and functional testing code in C/C++ and PHP
Work
Feb 2022 — Jul 2022

Technical Writer

Apache APISIX — API7.ai · Shenzhen, Remote

Developer Documentation

  • Redesigned developer and user documentation for the Apache APISIX project
  • Created Katacoda tutorials for APISIX, collaborating with the community and integrating feedback
Community
Nov 2018 — Sep 2022

SRIJAN, NIT Hamirpur

Hindi Head Editor

Feb 2022 — Sep 2022

Led the Hindi editorial team for the college's literary and technical magazine

Executive Editor

Jul 2020 — Jan 2022

Editorial work for the college's literary and technical magazine

Associate Editor

Jul 2019 — Jun 2020

Associate editorial work for the college magazine

Hindi Editor

Nov 2018 — Jun 2019

Hindi section editorial work for the college magazine

Community
Jan 2019 — Jun 2022

CSEC, NIT Hamirpur

President

Jul 2021 — Jun 2022

Led the Computer Science Engineers Club — organized hackathons, workshops, and coding competitions

Coordinator

Sep 2020 — Jun 2021

Coordinated events and activities for the Computer Science Engineers Club

Executive Member

Aug 2019 — Aug 2020

Active executive member contributing to club events and technical initiatives

Volunteer

Jan 2019 — Jul 2019

Volunteered for club events and technical workshops

Community
May 2021 — Sep 2023

GitHub Campus Expert

GitHub Education

Managing open-source communities, hosting webinars, workshops, and coding boot camps. Beta testing upcoming GitHub features and tools.

Work
Mar 2021 — May 2021

Java Software Developer

XResearch · Bengaluru, Remote

Inventory & Billing Management

  • Designed and developed an Inventory and Billing Management App using Spring Boot and PostgreSQL
  • Created REST API endpoints according to functional requirements
Community
Feb 2021 — May 2021

Mentor

GirlScript Summer of Code

Guided beginners getting started with open source development

Community
Dec 2020 — Feb 2021

Participant

Script Winter of Code

Contributed to open source projects during the winter program

Community
Nov 2020 — Feb 2021

Open Source Contributor

VideoLAN

Contributed to VLC media player and related projects

Work
Sep 2020 — Nov 2020

Technical Writer

VideoLAN — Google Season of Docs 2020 · Paris, Remote

VLC for Android Documentation

  • Documented VLC for Android using Sphinx, reStructuredText, Markdown, and shell scripting
  • Delivered user-friendly documentation with supporting screenshots and step-by-step tutorials
Education
Jan 2020 — Jan 2021

Certificate in Introduction to Quantum Computing with IBM Quantum

The Coding School

Community
Nov 2018 — Jul 2022

Volunteer

GNU/Linux Users Group, NIT Hamirpur

Open-source community at NIT Hamirpur — shared knowledge about GNU/Linux and FOSS

Community
Sep 2018 — May 2022

Volunteer

SPIC MACAY, NIT Hamirpur

Organized arts and culture events on campus

Education
Jul 2018 — Jun 2022

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering

National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur · Himachal Pradesh, India

CGPA: 8.45/10

Education
Jun 2015 — May 2017

Intermediate in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry

Sri Chaitanya Junior Kalasala

Education
Aug 2010 — Apr 2015

Matriculation

Simultala Awasiya Vidyalaya

Skills

Languages

C++GoCPythonBash

Cloud & DevOps

KubernetesOpenShiftDockerTektonCDCI/CDkcp

Tools & Platforms

GNU/LinuxGitCMakeFedoraGitHub ActionsArgo CD

Leadership

Sprint PlanningTeam LeadCode ReviewMentoring

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.