Ana Margarita Medina

I'm a self-taught engineer turned developer advocate, and I specialize in bridging the gap between high-scale infrastructure and the people building on it. My mission right now is to build the education layer that turns AI from a speed booster into a reliable, production-grade engineering paradigm.

I was born in Costa Rica to a Nicaraguan family and my tech career took off in Miami, mostly by refusing to take no for an answer. Fifteen years later that's still roughly the method. I've worked at Google, Uber, SFEFCU, and a string of Miami startups. At Uber I was an SRE running chaos experiments against production microservices, which is where the rest of this started.

Since then I've worked on the adoption problem from three different angles. Every category shift has the same one: the demos are compelling, and engineers still have to be shown, inside their own systems, why they should trust the thing in production. At Gremlin I helped build the chaos engineering category, back when Netflix was the only well-known practitioner and engineering leaders had to be convinced that deliberately breaking production was a discipline rather than a stunt. At Lightstep and ServiceNow the product and the OpenTelemetry standard already existed, so the work was closing the gap between what customers were told and where they actually got stuck. At Upbound, Crossplane was an established CNCF project, and the work was onboarding and time to first value.

Most of my code lives in other people's orgs, so my GitHub profile undersells it. I 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, a KubeCon Program Track Chair, and I sat on the Keptn Governance Board and Board of Advisors.

I've given 100+ public talks in English and Spanish, including AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, DockerCon, DevOpsDays, and All Day DevOps.

When time permits, I work to dispel the stigma around mental health in tech and to bring more Black and Latinx folks into the industry. As a Latina in Silicon Valley, I use whatever voice I've got to encourage women in Hispanic and Latinx communities to learn to code.