Jared Watts
Founding Engineer at Crossplane project
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJared Watts is a founding engineer and open-source leader with 10 years of cloud-native and distributed systems experience, based in San Diego. He co-created and maintains two influential CNCF projects—Crossplane and Rook—bringing deep expertise in Kubernetes storage orchestration (Ceph) and multi-cloud control plane tooling. At Upbound and across Crossplane/Rook he’s implemented core database support (AWS RDS, GCP CloudSQL), Azure provider integrations, and operational improvements like finalizers and status conditions that make controllers production-ready. His background includes senior engineering roles at Quantum, Symform, and Microsoft, giving him a strong foundation in storage, automation, and backend systems. Jared combines systems-level thinking with hands-on implementation—often shipping provider clients, controllers, and deployment automation—and quietly shapes how teams manage cloud resources via open source.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Engineering at Virginia TechHigh School, High School at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Github Skills (27)
kubernetes10
docker10
cloud-computing10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
storage10
cloud-infrastructure10
microsoft-azure10
dockers10
gcp10
automation10
go10
control-panel10
api10
aws10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
crossplane/crossplane
Sep 2018 - Oct 2022
The Cloud Native Control Plane
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Cloud Engineer
Back-end Developer & Cloud EngineerContributions:27 releases, 716 reviews, 426 commits in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jared Watts contributed significantly to adding support for AWS RDS and GCP CloudSQL databases, implementing core database connectivity logic. He also worked on integrating support for Wordpress with GCP CloudSQL and improved the GCP CloudSQL controller by adding finalizers and status conditions, which reflects a focus on operational aspects. Furthermore, he developed Azure provider support, including APIs, clients, and quickstart guides for MySQL server and AKS clusters.
containerscloud-computingserverlesscloudmulticloud
crossplane-contrib/provider-aws
Sep 2018 - Aug 2021
Crossplane AWS Provider
Role in this project:Back-end & Cloud Engineer
Back-end & Cloud EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 181 commits, 65 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jared primarily contributed to the AWS provider for Crossplane, focusing on implementing support for AWS RDS and GCP CloudSQL database instances. Their work involved modifying existing code to interact with AWS RDS and incorporate GCP CloudSQL functionality, demonstrating expertise in both AWS and GCP database services. They also added license headers and Azure provider support, extending the project's cloud platform compatibility. Further contributions included improving GCP CloudSQL controller functionalities, which involved using status conditions and adding finalizers.
providerterraformawsterraform-modulecrossplane
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