Nell Jerram
Principal Software Engineer at Tigera
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNell Jerram is a Principal Software Engineer in Cambridge with 26 years building robust networked systems, currently shaping Calico networking and security at Tigera. She combines deep backend and DevOps expertise—demonstrated by significant contributions to Project Calico’s libcalico-go, calicoctl and CNI plugin—with a strong focus on testing, automation and Kubernetes integration. Her work spans open source and enterprise SaaS, adding pragmatic features like doNotTrack policy flags and TLS verification controls while improving CI and IPAM diagnostics. A long-time OpenStack contributor and former Metaswitch engineer, she brings protocol-level experience and large-scale deployment know-how to cloud-native networking. Trained as a fluid mechanics PhD from Cambridge, she pairs rigorous analytical thinking with hands-on systems craftsmanship, often surfacing subtle fixes that improve observability and testability across complex distributed environments.
26 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Eton CollegeBA Engineering, BA Engineering at University of CambridgePhD Fluid Mechanics, PhD Fluid Mechanics at Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
French, Spanish
Github Skills (28)
kubernetes10
docker10
apidoc10
testing10
net10
kubernetes-networking10
cni10
ip10
networking10
dockers10
cicd10
automation10
go10
api10
kubernetes-pods10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
projectcalico/calico
Oct 2016 - Jan 2023
Cloud native networking and network security
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 299 reviews, 972 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nell primarily focused on improving the codebase and automation. Their work included fixing typos, enhancing documentation, and automating the update of Calico version-dependent PPA and RPM repo refs. They also contributed by implementing health endpoints for Typha, which is a component of the Calico project. Furthermore, the user made modifications to incorporate new IP address ranges for testing.
multi-clustersecuritynetworkingsdnvirtual-network
projectcalico/libcalico-go
Nov 2016 - Dec 2020
Golang Calico library functions: https://www.projectcalico.org
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 14 reviews, 162 commits in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Nell primarily contributed to the `projectcalico/libcalico-go` repository by adding and modifying features related to the network policy data model. They introduced the "untracked" property and subsequently refactored it to "doNotTrack," enhancing policy specifications and related testing. Furthermore, they made improvements to existing documentation. The user also worked on implementing a mechanism for the K8s backend to allow users to set an environmental variable and skip verification of the API server's TLS certificate.
golangcalico
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