Ana Margarita Medina

I'm an engineer and Staff Developer Advocate building technical education at the intersection of AI engineering and production reliability: agentic coding workflows, observability, chaos engineering, platform engineering, and the developer tooling around it. Built first, taught second.

I've helped hundreds of companies get started with site reliability engineering, chaos engineering, observability, and platform engineering. That work has run through Gremlin, Lightstep and ServiceNow, and most recently Upbound, and inside CNCF projects including Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Crossplane, and Keptn. I've also partnered with AWS, PagerDuty, Datadog, and CircleCI on hands-on workshops.

Before developer advocacy I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Uber. My roles have spanned Software Engineering, SRE, Developer Platform, and Developer Advocacy.

My path into tech wasn't linear. I was born in Costa Rica to a Nicaraguan family and taught myself to code, mostly by refusing to take no for an answer. Fifteen years later that's still roughly the method. I got here without the traditional path, so I teach the way I wish someone had taught me: nothing skipped, nothing assumed.

I help run and organize developer-focused events, and open source is where I do my best work. I've co-organized and MC'd ChaosConf, FailoverConf, and Deserted Island DevOps, hosted inside Animal Crossing. I've chaired KubeCon program tracks, served six consecutive cycles on the Kubernetes Release Team (v1.25 through v1.30), and sit on the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee. I'm a two-time CNCF Ambassador and two-time AWS Community Builder, and I've given 100+ talks in English and Spanish, including AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, and DockerCon.

My focus now is AI engineering and what it takes to trust AI-assisted development in production. I stay hands-on for it.

The goal is to get engineers past the demo and into production with something they trust, to keep chipping away at the stigma around mental health in tech, and to help the people this industry has underestimated break in and level up: Black and Latinx folks, women and non-binary engineers, and anyone who got here without a traditional path.