Promoted to Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
On April 1, 2026, I was promoted to Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.
I don't usually care much about job titles. But given the uncertainty in the tech industry, the intensity of the past fourteen months, and everything that happened in between, this one hit differently. It's a milestone I genuinely needed.
The road here
If you've read my 2025 year in review, you know it was a pivotal but difficult year. The transfer of Red Hat's middleware teams to IBM shook me. Being a Red Hatter has always been more than a job for me, it's an identity tied to the free software values I've admired since I first started using Linux as a teenager.
But difficult years have a way of producing unexpected opportunities. In hindsight, I think the work that came out of 2025 is what ultimately led to this promotion.
The Kubernetes MCP Server
In early 2025, I built a proof of concept for a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to manage Kubernetes clusters, originally based on the Fabric8 Kubernetes Client. The first time I saw an AI agent autonomously deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes, I knew this was something special.
I demoed it internally at Red Hat, and the response made it clear this could grow into something much bigger. Seeing the potential, I made a bet: port it to Go. Most of the Kubernetes ecosystem is built in Go, and Kubernetes developers are far more comfortable with it. It turned out to be the right call.
The project grew fast. People from across Red Hat reached out to collaborate. The repository joined the Containers organization on GitHub, alongside tools like Podman and Buildah. Today, the Kubernetes MCP Server has a thriving upstream community with many active contributors and a healthy ecosystem of forks.
It's also being productized as the MCP server for Red Hat OpenShift, with a dedicated team at Red Hat working on it. I actively collaborate with this team, and without them the project wouldn't be where it is today. I feel extremely lucky to be working with such talented people.
AI-assisted development
The MCP server wasn't the only way AI reshaped my work. I also restructured my entire development workflow around AI coding agents. I wrote about this in Boosting My Developer Productivity with AI in 2025, and later built an AI Coding Agent Dashboard to orchestrate multiple agent sessions across devices in real time.
This wasn't just a personal experiment. I've given three internal presentations at Red Hat on how I leverage AI tooling, the workflows I've built, and the productivity gains I've measured. The interest from colleagues across the company has been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey.
The foundation
None of these new initiatives meant I could step away from my existing responsibilities. Throughout all of this, I continued maintaining the Fabric8 Kubernetes Client and Eclipse JKube, two projects I've been responsible for since I joined Red Hat more than six years ago.
The Kubernetes Client is a foundational building block for projects like Quarkus, Spring Cloud, and Java Operator SDK. Eclipse JKube remains a key tool for Java developers deploying to Kubernetes. Keeping these projects healthy while taking on everything else was one of the hardest and most important parts of the past year.
I'm grateful that I now have help maintaining them, which has been essential as my scope expanded.
Hard work and good luck
Looking back, I think this promotion was a mix of hard work and good timing. I was fortunate that MCP was emerging as a standard and AI-assisted development was gaining traction right when I was in a position to act on both. I worked hard, but I also got lucky. Not everyone who works this hard gets the same recognition, and I'm very aware of that.
2025 and early 2026 have been the most intense period of my career. On top of all the new initiatives, I still had to sustain the Fabric8 Kubernetes Client and Eclipse JKube, hire someone to help with maintenance, and deliver three internal presentations on AI-assisted development. This promotion feels like the culmination of all of it.
Gratitude
This promotion wouldn't have happened without the people around me.
My managers gave me the autonomy and trust to pursue ambitious projects. They believed in my work when the path forward wasn't always clear, and they created the environment that made all of this possible.
The peers who provided feedback during the promotion process were generous and deeply encouraging. Knowing that the people I work with value my contributions means more to me than the title itself.
The tech industry is going through turbulent times. Recent changes at Red Hat have affected people I deeply respect, people who directly contributed to my growth and success. I carry their support with me, and this milestone is bittersweet because of it.
Looking forward
I don't know what comes next. What I do know is that the mission hasn't changed: building free and open source tools that make developers' lives easier, whether those developers are humans, AI agents, or both.
I'm incredibly grateful for this recognition, and even more motivated by the work still ahead.
