John Kjell
Principal Cloud Native Consultant
Eagan, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Kjell is a Principal Cloud Native Consultant with eight years of experience building secure, enterprise-grade cloud native platforms and developer workflows from code to cluster. He has led engineering teams at VMware Tanzu to deliver secure software supply chain features and recently served as Director of Open Source at TestifySec before joining ControlPlane, bringing deep practical experience in signing, scanning, and storing container images for DevSecOps. As Co-Chair of the CNCF Security TAG, he blends technical leadership with ecosystem stewardship, helping shape security best practices across Kubernetes and container registries. Based in Eagan, Minnesota, he pairs product-focused delivery with research-driven prototyping rooted in a Computer Science degree from UW–Madison, and is known for translating complex security requirements into pragmatic developer-facing solutions.
8 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-MadisonAAS Liberal Arts, AAS Liberal Arts at University of Wisconsin - Rock County
Github Skills (62)
container-management10
devsecops10
container10
docker10
pluggable10
code-signing10
artifact10
supply-chain-security10
verification10
open-policy-agent10
security10
rego10
helm10
access-control10
attestation10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
testifysec/archivista-data-provider
Sep 2023 - Apr 2025
Integrate OPA Gatekeeper's new ExternalData feature with witness to determine whether the images are valid by verifying them against a witness policy
Contributions:119 reviews, 130 PRs, 133 pushes in 1 year 6 months
opa-gatekeeper
SBOMit/specification
Oct 2023 - Dec 2025
Contributions:2 reviews, 1 PR, 1 push in 2 years 2 months
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