Ellis Tarn
Principal Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEllis Tarn is a Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building cloud-native and ML infrastructure, currently focused on making Kubernetes easier at AWS EKS. He combines deep open-source pedigree—creator of Karpenter and early contributor to KServe/KFServing—with a strong product sensibility, preferring early-stage work that reduces long-term technical debt. His background spans leading inference and finetuning services at Meta and Vertex AI Inference at Google, giving him rare cross-cutting expertise in compute, networking, storage, and model serving. Pragmatic and hands-on, Ellis architects foundational systems (autoscaling, admission webhooks, deployment mutators) while keeping product-market fit front of mind. Based in Seattle, he often gravitates toward projects where rethinking assumptions yields disproportionate impact.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at UCSD
Github Skills (25)
kubernetes10
docker10
controller10
apidoc10
webhooks10
testing10
machine-learning10
cloud-infrastructure10
dockers10
cicd10
go10
mlops10
api10
kubernetes-pods10
tensorflow9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
aws/karpenter-provider-aws
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
Karpenter is a Kubernetes Node Autoscaler built for flexibility, performance, and simplicity.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4458 reviews, 443 commits, 1137 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ellis's contributions focus on the development and maintenance of a Kubernetes node autoscaler. Their work includes implementing core functionality, like deep copying and validation, using tools like controller-gen, and refactoring code. The user also added various tests and infrastructure for integration testing using Ginkgo and S3 to read and export logs. Their work appears to be foundational, involving the creation of new components.
autoscalingperformancek8skubernetesnodejs
kubernetes-sigs/karpenter
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Karpenter is a Kubernetes Node Autoscaler built for flexibility, performance, and simplicity.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Cloud Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Cloud EngineerContributions:653 reviews, 35 commits, 112 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ellis's commits primarily focus on maintaining and improving the project's build and deployment processes. They made changes to the toolchain scripts, updated dependencies in the go.mod file, and modified the webhook setup. The user also updated the project's build system and dependencies, specifically addressing issues related to Knative and dependencies. Overall, the user is focused on infrastructure and streamlining deployment processes.
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