# Kris Nóva

> Kris Nóva (1987-2023) was a principal engineer at GitHub, co-founder of The Nivenly Foundation, author, alpinist, and transgender activist who shaped the cloud-native infrastructure world. Best known for creating kubicorn, the Aurae runtime, and co-authoring Cloud Native Infrastructure with O'Reilly, she lived a life of radical generosity - growing Hachyderm from 700 to 40,000 users, founding the Privilege Escalation Foundation to support gender minorities in STEM, and writing Hacking Capitalism to help marginalized technologists navigate an industry that had once left her unhoused. She died on August 16, 2023, in a climbing accident in Seattle.

- **Role:** Principal Engineer at GitHub (deceased August 16, 2023)
- **Organizations:** GitHub, The Nivenly Foundation, Hachyderm, CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), Falco Security, Privilege Escalation Foundation
- **Nationality:** American
- **Known for:** Created kubicorn, a widely-adopted Kubernetes infrastructure management tool, Co-authored Cloud Native Infrastructure (O'Reilly, 2017) with Justin Garrison, Authored Hacking Capitalism (2022), a guide to systemic exploitation in tech

## Career timeline

- **early career** — Experienced homelessness in the Midwest; entered tech industry and participated in three successful startup exits
- **2015** — Worked at SolidFire on storage infrastructure
- **2016** — Joined Microsoft's Deis division; contributed to Kubernetes as developer advocate and engineer
- **2017** — Co-authored Cloud Native Infrastructure (O'Reilly Media) with Justin Garrison; joined Heptio
- **2018** — Continued at Heptio/VMware (after acquisition); created kubicorn, Kubernetes infrastructure management tool
- **2019** — Joined Sysdig as Chief Open Source Advocate; led Falco open source project adoption (240% growth)
- **2021** — Joined Twilio as Senior Principal Software Engineer; founded the Privilege Escalation Foundation, distributing $5,000 in sponsorships
- **2022** — Authored Hacking Capitalism independently; launched Aurae runtime project in Go/Rust; managed Hachyderm growth from 700 to 40,000 users
- **2023 Jan** — Co-founded The Nivenly Foundation as governing entity for Hachyderm and Aurae Runtime Project
- **2023 Feb** — Joined GitHub as Principal Engineer for infrastructure platform engineering
- **2023 Aug 16** — Passed away in a climbing accident in Seattle, Washington, at age 36

## Achievements

- Created kubicorn, a widely-adopted Kubernetes infrastructure management tool
- Co-authored Cloud Native Infrastructure (O'Reilly, 2017) with Justin Garrison
- Authored Hacking Capitalism (2022), a guide to systemic exploitation in tech
- Created the Aurae runtime - a memory-safe distributed systems daemon written in Rust (1.9k GitHub stars)
- Co-founded The Nivenly Foundation (2023) for open source sustainability and governance
- Grew Hachyderm Mastodon instance from 700 to 40,000 users in one month (Nov-Dec 2022)
- Led Falco open source adoption growth of 240% as Chief Open Source Advocate at Sysdig
- Founded the Privilege Escalation Foundation to support gender minorities in STEM
- Created boopkit - a Linux eBPF backdoor research tool (1.7k GitHub stars)
- Created NAML - Kubernetes YAML to Golang converter (1.3k GitHub stars)
- CNCF Ambassador
- 388 public GitHub repositories; 3.6k GitHub followers
- Gave influential 'Kubernetes clusterfuck' talks exposing critical security/complexity issues
- Contributed to Linux kernel, Kubernetes, Go programming language, and Rust

## Latest updates

- **2023-08** — Kris Nóva passed away on August 16, 2023 from injuries sustained in a climbing accident in Seattle, Washington, at age 36
- **2023-08** — The Nivenly Foundation published a memorial and announced stewardship plans for Hachyderm and Aurae in her honor
- **2023-02** — Joined GitHub as Principal Engineer for infrastructure platform engineering
- **2023-01** — Co-founded The Nivenly Foundation as a governance entity for Hachyderm and Aurae Runtime Project

## Links

- Website: https://krisnova.net
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kris-nova
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/krisnova
- GitHub: https://github.com/krisnova
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvH2UexTzcbZRwCS6OxJ3w

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/kris-nova
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-21