Alena Varkočková
Staff Software Engineer at Redpanda Data
Prague, Prague, Czechia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlena Varkočková is a Staff Software Engineer with 14 years of experience building cloud-native, distributed systems and Kubernetes operators, currently driving the agenting data plane and AI Gateway at Redpanda Data. She specializes in Go, Kubernetes, and automation, and authored the first Redpanda Kubernetes operator used in production for their hosted offering. Her background spans backend, DevOps and reliability work across notable open-source projects like Redpanda, Linkerd, controller-runtime and KUDO, where she improved testing, CI/CD and operator best practices. She combines hands-on engineering with product-driven initiatives—leading usage-based billing and a serverless launch at Redpanda—and is actively optimizing her developer workflow using LLMs. Based in Prague, she balances deep systems expertise with practical delivery, and outside work she’s a developer, traveller and foodie.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bc., Software Engineering, Bc., Software Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering
English, German
Github Skills (46)
service-mesh10
mesos10
kubernetes10
docker10
tls1210
back-end-development10
python10
email-notifications10
testing10
alertdialog10
configuration-management10
command-line-interface10
kafka10
alertview10
alerts10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
kudobuilder/kudo
Apr 2019 - Apr 2021
Kubernetes Universal Declarative Operator (KUDO)
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 releases, 126 reviews, 273 commits in 2 years
Contributions summary:Alena's commits primarily focused on improving the formatting script and fixing build processes, including ensuring the use of the goimports tool. Additionally, the user refactored unit tests to avoid file system dependencies and removed git credentials, indicating efforts towards more streamlined and reliable builds. They also implemented CircleCI tests for every PR, demonstrating a focus on CI/CD and build automation.
zookeeperkubernetes-communitymysqldeclarativeoperator
redpanda-data/redpanda
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:681 reviews, 294 commits, 215 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Alena's commits primarily focused on building and maintaining the Redpanda cluster. They were involved in managing the build process, as seen with the changes to the build scripts. Additionally, the commits show the user's responsibility in configuring the environment. This is indicated in the code changes, which were related to setting up TLS configuration for the kafka api.
realtimezookeeperdata-platformkafka-api10x
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