Nathan Sweet
Founder at Stealth Startup
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Sweet is a founder and seasoned systems engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in eBPF, Linux networking, and cloud-native infrastructure. He is a Cilium committer and creator of the widely used cilium/ebpf Go library, contributing deep kernel-level tooling and observability features that power modern Kubernetes networking and security. Nathan's work spans hands-on backend engineering, DevOps, and product-grade refactors—decoupling Linux-specific code, improving maintainability, and hardening installations for production use. He has driven networking and control-plane efforts at companies like Isovalent/Cisco and DigitalOcean, and helped improve Terraform provider functionality for Azure. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, he combines low-level systems expertise with practical product thinking, often implementing subtle but high-impact changes such as batch map operations and kprobe support in eBPF tooling. Outside typical career paths, his academic background in Hebrew and Semitic linguistics hints at a broad intellectual curiosity that informs his pragmatic, detail-oriented approach.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Hebrew and Semitic Linguistics, Bachelor's degree Hebrew and Semitic Linguistics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonArchaeology Practicum Anthropology, Archaeology Practicum Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
English
Stackoverflow
432reputation
216kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (30)
kubernetes10
ebpf10
testing10
linux10
microsoft-azure10
terraform10
terraform-provider10
azure-resource-manager10
terraformer10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
golang10
azure10
devops10
containerization9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
cilium/cilium
Jul 2019 - Apr 2025
eBPF-based Networking, Security, and Observability
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 868 reviews, 388 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily focused on refactoring the codebase to improve maintainability and decouple Linux-specific code from non-Linux contexts. They moved code from the "endpoint" package to the "datapath" package and removed netlink package dependencies. Additionally, the user added functionality to the installation process by integrating the peer service and added features to make the installation more configurable, such as the option to specify a chart directory or enable endpoint lockdown on policy map overflow. The user also added tests to ensure functionality and fixes for a variety of bugs.
bpfcontainerskerneltroubleshootingkubernetes-networking
cilium/ebpf
Apr 2020 - Mar 2021
ebpf-go is a pure-Go library to read, modify and load eBPF programs and attach them to various hooks in the Linux kernel.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 4 commits, 13 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the `ebpf-go` library by modifying and extending the eBPF instruction set. They made several code changes to `ebpf-prog.go`, including adding new ALU, memory, and branch instructions, along with associated register definitions, suggesting a focus on implementing and improving the core functionality of the eBPF program. The user also added documentation, examples, and utility functions to the library and updated the code to support batch map operations and to allow the creation of kprobe and kretprobe events.
golangkernelattachebpf-programsgo-library
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