Kornilios Kourtis
Principal Engineer, Isovalent At Cisco
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKornilios Kourtis is a Principal Engineer at Isovalent (Cisco) with 14 years of systems research and production experience spanning storage, networking, runtimes, and distributed systems. He combines deep academic roots—a PhD and research posts at ETH Zurich and IBM Research where he built OSS projects like uDepot—with hands-on engineering on eBPF-based networking in the prominent Cilium project. His work blends low-level systems design (NVM/SSD host translation layers, OS and runtime internals) with operational improvements in performance, observability, and packet correctness for cloud-native networks. At Isovalent he has progressed from senior engineer to technical lead and principal roles, shaping both architecture and delivery. Colleagues rely on him to bridge research prototypes and production-grade infrastructure, often surfacing subtle hardware-software interactions that others miss. Based in Zurich, he thrives on tackling idiosyncratic device behavior and turning it into robust, well-documented system components.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Engineering at National Technical University of Athens
Github Skills (21)
kubernetes10
container10
ebpf10
networking10
bpf10
security10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
debug9
observability9
performance-analytics9
performance-monitor9
debugging9
dockers9
cicd9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
cilium/cilium
Jul 2020 - May 2024
eBPF-based Networking, Security, and Observability
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:544 reviews, 158 PRs, 214 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Kornilios primarily contributed to the Cilium project by implementing and improving the BPF-based networking, security, and observability features. Their work involved modifying BPF code, specifically focusing on connection tracking and egress gateway functionalities to address issues related to dropped packets and ensure correct behavior in different network configurations. Additionally, the user improved the documentation and scripts related to performance evaluation and infrastructure, demonstrating knowledge of both the core system logic and operational aspects of the project. The user also addressed the issue with the daemon and enhanced the code to ensure its proper functioning.
bpfcontainerskerneltroubleshootingkubernetes-networking
isovalent/kubenetbench
Jul 2020 - Dec 2020
Contributions:1 review, 60 commits, 1 PR in 4 months
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