Samuel Hawker
Squad Leader And Software Engineer, Event Endpoint Management at IBM
Winchester, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Hawker is a Squad Leader and Software Engineer at IBM with seven years’ experience building and operating Kafka-based, cloud-native event streaming platforms. He leads the Kubernetes Operator squad for Event Endpoint Management, ensuring reliable deployments and IBM-compliant operator behavior while also contributing as an Open Source Maintainer to the widely used Strimzi Kafka Operator. His background spans low-level backend work with the raw Kafka protocol, CI automation, and Kubernetes-focused DevOps—translating research-honed analytical skills from a Mathematical Sciences master's into pragmatic production systems. Based in Winchester, he brings a rare blend of operator implementation expertise and team leadership, with a track record of improving deployment automation for complex streaming components like Kafka Connect and MirrorMaker.
7 years of coding experience
Beechencliff SchoolMaster’s Degree, Mathematical Sciences, 2:1, Master’s Degree, Mathematical Sciences, 2:1 at University of Bath
English
Github Skills (12)
k8s-operator10
javas10
kubernetes10
kafka10
apache-kafka10
kubernetes-operator10
operator-sdk10
java10
kubernetes-pods10
operator10
yaml9
cicd8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator
Oct 2019 - Oct 2021
Apache Kafka® running on Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:96 reviews, 44 commits, 71 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributed to implementing and maintaining the Kubernetes operator for Apache Kafka within the Strimzi project. Their work involved adding Kubernetes-recommended labels, defining configurations, and creating and applying resources (such as secrets, services, and deployments). These efforts included code changes related to the deployment of Kafka Connect, Kafka MirrorMaker, and user operators, demonstrating a focus on automation, deployment, and management of Kafka-related components within a Kubernetes environment.
kafka-streamsapache-kafkadcosdata-streamsdata-stream
samuel-hawker/proposals
Jun 2020 - Aug 2023
Strimzi proposals
Contributions:2 reviews, 8 PRs, 34 pushes in 3 years 2 months
optimizationsproposalsstrimzitlaplusco-simulation
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