Darren Shepherd
Chief Architect And Co-Founder at Obot AI
Greater Phoenix Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDarren Shepherd is a seasoned cloud-native architect and entrepreneur with 13 years of experience building distributed infrastructure and container platforms. As Chief Architect and Co-Founder of Obot AI and former Chief Architect/CTO at Rancher Labs and SUSE, he combines product leadership with deep hands-on engineering across Kubernetes, container runtimes, and storage. His prolific open-source contributions span high-impact projects like k3s, RKE2, Rancher fleet, Longhorn, and Docker/Moby, often touching core backend, runtime integration, and DevOps tooling. He excels at refactoring and dependency hygiene, security-driven fixes, and pragmatic automation that make large-scale orchestration reliable and reproducible. Based in the Greater Phoenix Area, Darren brings a rare blend of startup grit and enterprise-scale experience—he pivoted from building the cloud to applying that systems expertise to AI. An understated strength is his pattern of improving operational UX (installers, CLIs, init flows) so complex systems are actually operable by teams in the field.
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 (88)
dependency-management10
postgresql10
python10
testing10
command-line-interface10
bash10
javas10
automation10
install-script10
build-automation10
maven10
rest-api10
backend10
clustering10
installers10
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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