Kim Schaefer is a Senior DevOps and Cloud Engineer focused on Kubernetes, GitOps, and secure platform engineering. She designs and operates production Kubernetes platforms on Google Cloud, with a particular interest in how deployment authority, auditability, and automation intersect in real-world systems.

Kim’s work centers on building GitOps platforms that teams can actually trust in production, especially in environments where change must be deliberate, accountable, and defensible. She enjoys translating complex architectural and security requirements into practical patterns that platform and application teams can adopt without sacrificing developer experience.

Kim is an open-source contributor and has previously spoken at Open Source Summit and GrafanaCON. She is especially passionate about sharing lessons learned from operating real systems—what breaks, what scales, and where architectural assumptions tend to fall apart.