Paul Czarkowski is a seasoned DevOps engineer, cloud architect, and open-source advocate with over 20 years of experience designing, automating, and scaling IT infrastructure. Originally from Brisbane, Australia, Paul has spent the past 15 years in the United States working with industry-leading technology companies including Red Hat, VMware, IBM, and Electronic Arts, where he specialized in large-scale cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and DevOps automation.

Paul has been at the forefront of cloud-native technology, running Docker in production as early as 2014 and pioneering Kubernetes automation before it became an industry standard. He is passionate about optimizing and codifying operations for both legacy and modern applications, helping enterprises adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native architectures.

A recognized leader in the global DevOps community, Paul is an active speaker, organizer, and mentor. He has spoken at and organized DevOpsDays conferences around the world, including in Austin, Chicago, and Kyiv, and has been a fixture in the Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Cloud Native communities.

Recently he has been extending his technical expertise to self-hosted, open-source AI, where he explores the intersection of private AI, home automation, and secure, locally-run large language models (LLMs).

Beyond technology, Paul is a competitive cook and barbecue pitmaster. Whether he’s baking sourdough bread, perfecting Texas-style barbecue in his custom-built offset smoker, or winning food competitions across the country, he brings the same passion and precision to cooking as he does to engineering.

For speaking engagements, consulting, or just to talk about the latest in cloud, DevOps, and open-source AI, you can find Paul at tech.paulcz.net or github.com/paulczar.