SVP Engineering - Chainguard

Dustin Kirkland is the SVP of Engineering at Chainguard, the safe source for open source. Spanning 25 years as an engineer, product manager, SVP of Engineering, VP of Product, CTO, and CPO, Dustin has launched successful hardware, software, and services products at some of the world’s largest companies (IBM, Google, Goldman Sachs), as well as leading growth startups (Canonical/Ubuntu, Gazzang, Apex Fintech, Chainguard). Open source software, cloud security, IoT devices, and financial services technology are among his passions and expertise. Dustin enjoys advising startups on strategy, and well-tuned product and engineering methodologies.

Presentations

Agentic Pipelines for an OS Supply Chain

Agentic workflows are rapidly becoming the next major shift in software engineering: systems that can plan, act, verify, learn, and repeat—turning “prompting” into production-grade automation. In this talk, I’ll share a practical framework for how developers can adopt agentic workflows responsibly, and why they unlock a new level of leverage for building and operating complex systems. The goal is simple: help the Linux community build software systems that get better over time—secure by default, and fast by design today.