Darren Shepherd
Chief Architect And Co-Founder at Obot AI
Greater Phoenix Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDarren Shepherd is a seasoned technology leader and co-founder, currently Chief Architect at Obot AI in the Greater Phoenix area with 13 years of professional experience. He previously served as CTO and Chief Architect at Rancher Labs and Chief Architect at SUSE, leading architecture for cloud-native platforms and Kubernetes distributions. An active open-source contributor, Darren has made substantive backend and DevOps contributions to high-profile projects like Moby (Docker), k3s, Longhorn and k3OS — from adding label-based filtering and UTS namespace sharing in Docker to EFI installation and cloud-init support for k3OS and core storage logic for Longhorn. He blends deep Go and systems engineering expertise with a focus on operability, refactoring, and resilient distributed systems, and has recently pivoted his skills toward productizing AI infrastructure. Known for pragmatic, behind-the-scenes fixes and reliability improvements, he brings founder-level ownership to complex infrastructure problems.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at California State University, Northridge
Github Skills (108)
dependency-management10
dockerce10
postgresql10
python10
testing10
commandline-interface10
command-line-interface10
docker-ce10
bash10
installscript10
javas10
automation10
ci-cd10
install-script10
commandline10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
rancher/cattle
Mar 2014 - Apr 2018
Infrastructure orchestration engine for Rancher 1.x
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:195 releases, 3841 commits, 2848 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Darren primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Rancher Cattle project, implementing features related to setting management and the creation of registration tokens. They worked with Java code, addressing issues within the settings API and adding functionalities to the v1/registrationtokens endpoint. The user also performed general maintenance tasks, such as fixing Flake8 issues.
orchestrationinfrastructuredockerranchermiddle-managers
k3s-io/k3s
Jun 2018 - Jun 2022
Lightweight Kubernetes
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:23 releases, 16 reviews, 1974 commits in 4 years
Contributions summary:Darren contributed to the refactoring and configuration of the k3s agent, specifically focusing on configuration parameters, CRI runtime, and file management for various components. The commits reflect improvements to the system setup, including initializing the container runtime. The code changes also involve improvements to the API server and kubelet functionality.
k3dcloudfoundryk8skuberneteskubelet
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