Joel Speed
Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
Greater Bristol Area, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Speed is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat with a decade of experience designing and shipping cloud-native infrastructure, specializing in Kubernetes and OpenShift. He drives core Machine API and Cluster API work—contributing leader election, observability, and client generation improvements to high-profile projects like controller-runtime and cluster-api. Joel combines deep backend and DevOps skills with cloud provider expertise across AWS, Azure, and vSphere, having influenced installer, release tooling, and machine-config components to improve multi-cloud reliability. A syndicated blogger featured on InfoQ and The New Stack, he also improves developer experience through build automation, CI hygiene, and test robustness. Notably, his contributions span both API design (OpenShift API Machine enhancements) and pragmatic operations (Azure log gathering and installer fixes), reflecting a rare blend of systems-level design and hands-on engineering.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors of Mathematics Mathematics, Bachelors of Mathematics Mathematics at University of WarwickThe Knights Templar School
English
Github Skills (48)
kubernetes10
develop10
system-configuration10
controller10
cloud-computing10
apidoc10
kubernetes-apiserver10
api-design10
testing10
openid-connect10
openidc10
oid10
server-configuration10
bash10
cloud-infrastructure10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy
Sep 2017 - Dec 2022
A reverse proxy that provides authentication with Google, Azure, OpenID Connect and many more identity providers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 1020 reviews, 695 commits in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily focused on refactoring the code base, moving imports from bitly to pusher, and updating CI procedures to separate linting and testing, demonstrating a focus on code quality and maintainability. They also addressed build dependencies by fixing a critical fsnotify import. Additionally, they made changes to the project's core templating system and authentication mechanisms, indicating contributions to both backend features.
proxyreverse-proxyidentityazureoauth2
openshift/machine-api-operator
Jan 2020 - Oct 2022
Machine API operator
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:431 reviews, 175 commits, 125 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Joel contributed to the `openshift/machine-api-operator` repository, focusing on enhancing the MachineHealthCheck functionality. Their work included adding custom printer columns to the `MachineHealthCheck` API definition and incorporating a `NodeStartupTimeout` field within the same definition, improving the information displayed and control offered. The user's code changes show a strong understanding of the underlying API and implementation details of the operator. Further work involved replacing a constant with a value from the MachineHealthCheck, showcasing attention to detail and alignment of the solution.
operator-sdkapioperatorkuberneteskubernetes-operator
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