Michael Ledesma
VP, Demand Generation & Growth Marketing
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Ledesma is a growth marketing leader turned VP of Demand Generation at Redpanda Data, blending a decade-plus of B2B demand-gen experience with hands-on engineering contributions to open-source streaming and server frameworks. Based in San Jose, he has scaled demand and integrated marketing programs across enterprise storage and data companies like VAST Data, Diamanti, and DataStax, consistently translating product technicalities into measurable pipeline growth. Unusually for a marketing executive, he contributes code to projects like Redpanda and Seastar, focusing on security, GSSAPI/Kerberos principal mapping, OpenSSL integration, and core networking—bringing a rare security-aware engineering perspective to GTM strategy. That hybrid skill set helps him align product, engineering, and revenue teams to accelerate adoption of developer-first platforms. He holds commerce and sport management degrees and studied abroad at Durham, reflecting both commercial rigor and a curiosity for diverse perspectives.
3 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), Sport Management, Master of Arts (M.A.), Sport Management at San José State UniversitySCU Study Abroad Program, SCU Study Abroad Program at Durham UniversityBachelor of Commerce (B.Com.), Marketing, Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com.), Marketing at Santa Clara University
Github Skills (23)
c-language10
kerberos10
http10
authentication10
user-authentication10
networking10
security-protocol10
seastar10
openssl10
cprogramming-language10
tls129
tls139
mtls9
libtls9
aio8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
redpanda-data/redpanda
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:2078 reviews, 16 commits, 658 PRs in 10 days
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the development of security features within the Redpanda data streaming platform. They implemented a `gssapi_rule` class for Kerberos principal name mapping, demonstrating expertise in security protocols. Furthermore, they added classes related to GSSAPI principal mapping and integrated OpenSSL based cryptographic functions within a Java library. This work included creating an OpenSSL library context service, indicating involvement in the security and authentication layers of the project.
jvmkafkaredpandastreaming-datazookeeper
scylladb/seastar
May 2023 - Aug 2025
High performance server-side application framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 7 PRs, 30 comments in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Seastar framework by implementing and modifying core networking and HTTP functionalities. They added features for accessing remote and local socket addresses, and incorporated server and client address information into the request structure. The user also addressed TLS-related errors by exposing additional error codes and exposed DNS error category for user applications to handle them. Furthermore, they improved reactor functionality by implementing retry logic for `waitpid`.
server-sidec-plus-plusseastardpdkasync
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