About Me

Hi, I'm Heba, a software engineer on Microsoft's Azure Upstream team, where I work on Kubernetes and cloud native. I contribute across Kubernetes SIGs, serve as a co-chair for the Workload-Aware Scheduling working group, and have served on five release teams (1.18, 1.24, 1.25, 1.27, and 1.28), including leading Bug Triage for 1.25.

Much of my work today is on the scheduler, especially teaching it to understand whole workloads rather than single pods, along with topology and the other pieces that let Kubernetes run AI workloads efficiently. I write about this on my Substack and talk about it at KubeCon; you can find past and upcoming sessions on the Talks page.

What I enjoy most is helping people find their way into open source, especially engineers from the Arab world, Africa, and the Middle East. I mentor in the LFX Mentorship program. If you are thinking about contributing and don't know where to begin, that is exactly the kind of question I like to answer.

Outside work, I founded Volunteers for Palestine, which connects skilled volunteers with Palestinian organizations, and I am a co-founder of the Amal Initiative, a non-profit organization. I enjoy music and community work, and I read a lot of history and politics. Before Kubernetes, I spent a decade building backend systems in Java. I was born and raised in Egypt, studied Computer Engineering at Cairo University, and now live in California.