Erik Stidham
Senior Software Engineer at Tigera
Missouri, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolErik Stidham is a Senior Software Engineer with a decade of experience specializing in cloud-native networking, Kubernetes, and DevOps, currently contributing to Tigera and the widely adopted Project Calico ecosystem. He blends backend Go development with operational expertise—authoring networking features, validation logic, and integration work across calicoctl, felix, libcalico-go, and the CNI plugin while improving test reliability and automation. Erik has practical production experience managing large distributed platforms and CI/CD at companies like Virtustream and VelociData, and he’s comfortable taking changes from API and datastore design through to deployment and testing. Known for tackling flaky tests, certificate handling, and iptables/back-end auto-detection, he brings a pragmatic focus on robustness and observability in multi-cluster environments. Based in Missouri, he pairs systems-level thinking from an engineering background with hands-on contributions to one of the most widely deployed Kubernetes networking projects.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Computer Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology
Stackoverflow
201reputation
88kreached
11answers
0questions
Github Skills (43)
kubernetes10
container10
docker10
kops10
back-end-development10
validations10
testing10
kubernetes-networking10
cni10
command-line-interface10
policies10
validation10
networking10
dockers10
iptables10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
projectcalico/cni-plugin
Feb 2017 - May 2020
Calico CNI plugin
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 35 commits, 39 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Erik primarily contributed to the Calico CNI plugin, focusing on Kubernetes integration and operational improvements. Their work involved updating the Kubernetes API calls, refactoring code to use 'nodename' instead of 'hostname', and implementing tests to validate the changes. They also made changes to the installation scripts, including setting the MAC address for veth pairs, adjusting kubeconfig file generation, and enhancing the readiness checks. These contributions indicate a focus on both back-end functionality and DevOps-related configuration within the context of a networking plugin.
calicocnicalico-cnicni-plugin
projectcalico/calico
Feb 2017 - Aug 2022
Cloud native networking and network security
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:74 reviews, 306 commits, 290 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Erik's commits primarily focused on modifying the `calico_node` component, specifically adding functionality to read the `CLUSTER_TYPE` environment variable and update the datastore with that information upon startup. The changes included adding new tests to verify the correct behavior of the `CLUSTER_TYPE` configuration and addressing scenarios with different configurations. These changes directly impacted the node's initialization process, making it more configurable.
multi-clustersecuritynetworkingsdnvirtual-network
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.