Ross Kukulinski
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VP Product & Interim VP Engineering
Washington, United States
Résumé
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VP Product & Interim VP EngineeringTailscaleApr 2026 - Current (6 months)Leading Tailscale’s engineering organization on an interim basis (~100+ engineers and growing) while continuing as VP Product.
• Driving execution and delivery across the full engineering org
• Partnering with the CEO & President on org design, headcount planning, and engineering operations as Tailscale scales
• Participating in the search for a permanent VP Engineering
• Maintaining tight product–engineering alignment by holding both functions- VP of ProductTailscaleJan 2026 - Current (9 months)Member of the executive team at Tailscale driving the Product function & corporate product strategy.
- VP Product ManagementKong IncMay 2024 - Dec 2025 (1 year 8 months)Promoted to VP in recognition of Kong Konnect's business success—completing the company's transformation from on-prem packaged software to a cloud-first platform.
Key outcomes:
● 2.5x Konnect revenue growth
● launched Dedicated Cloud Gateways (full-SaaS experience)
● led the OpenMeter acquisition to add universal metering & billing
● shipped the new Developer Platform including Service Catalog and Developer Portal.
Currently driving AI-consumption experiences and accelerating product-led adoption across the platform. - Sr. Director of Product ManagementKong IncJan 2022 - May 2024 (2 years 5 months)Joined to re-launch Kong Konnect as a viable enterprise cloud platform. Over 2.5 years, grew Konnect revenue 9x (3x in 2022, 3x in 2023) while establishing the product management organization and building trust with field teams to position Konnect-first in every deal.
Shipped the unified runtime platform (Kong Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, and Kong Mesh), launched Analytics & API Products, and laid the multi-product foundation that enabled the company's cloud-majority transition. - Director of Product ManagementvmwareMay 2021 - Jan 2022 (9 months)Second promotion in 18 months. Moved to lead the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid product team across on-prem, public cloud, and edge"
Wrote the multi-year product strategy document and got executive buy-in from 4 BUs and the co-COOs to unify our Kubernetes runtimes. - Senior Product Line ManagervmwareFeb 2020 - May 2021 (1 year 4 months)First of two promotions at VMware as I expanded my leadership to include Tanzu Kubernetes Grid experience on vSphere, including Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, which is embedded into VMware's flagship product, vSphere 7 with Tanzu.
- Product Line ManagervmwareDec 2018 - Feb 2020 (1 year 3 months)Heptio was acquired by VMware in December 2018.
● Founding PM for Tanzu Mission Control and responsible for Kubernetes cluster provisioning and the cluster agent which can bring any conformance cluster under management
● Primary product architect responsible for the new engineered Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.
● VMware's Product Management lead for Cluster API, the upstream declarative Kubernetes cluster lifecycle project
● Go-to-expert for senior management to lead executive customer briefings on the VMware Tanzu portfolio and strategy - HSenior Product ManagerHeptioJun 2018 - Dec 2018 (7 months)[Heptio Acquired by VMware in December 2018]
Lead Product Manager for all of Heptio's open source projects and our commercial "undistribition", Heptio Kubernetes Subscription.
Led product for Heptio's open source portfolio: Cluster API, Velero, Sonobuoy, Contour, Gimbal, and ksonnet.
My work bridged our open source community, the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and our enterprise product capabilities. - HStaff Systems Architect / Head of Field EngineeringHeptioMay 2017 - Jun 2018 (1 year 2 months)I pitched myself to Heptio Co-Founders as their first product manager. Very politely, they told me there are zero engineers and no product... what exactly do I think I'll be managing?
Joined as employee 10 and was tasked with building pre- & post-sale engineering and support teams. Our strategy was to help enterprises be successful with Kubernetes, identify gaps in the ecosystem, and develop open source technologies to fill those gaps.
Grew the field engineering practice to 10 engineers and 2 support engineers before handing the reigns over to a "professional" field leader we recruited from CoreOS so that I could move to product management.
One of the first 50 worldwide Certified Kubernetes Administrators (C - Product ManagerNodesourceApr 2016 - Nov 2016 (8 months)Returned to the Node.JS community working with NodeSource to develop N|Solid, their Enterprise runtime.
- Founder & CEOYodlrMay 2014 - Nov 2016 (2 years 7 months)Founded and led Yodlr, a browser-based VoIP presentation tool. Spun out from ASTi, I managed company finances, customer acquisition, and product development. Wound down the business in 2016 after learning hard lessons as a first-time founder—then spent time placing my team before moving on.
- BOrganizer & SpeakerBayNodeJun 2013 - Dec 2015 (2 years 7 months)I revitalized the BayNode Meetup through curated Node.JS Talk Nights promoting local tech talent as well as distinguished guests from outside the SF Bay Area. I facilitated the merger with another local Meetup providing outstanding education events for beginner and intermediate developers. This grew the organizing team from one to four people to balance the workload. Finally, I worked closely with our corporate sponsors to ensure that each event was held at a high quality venue.
Through these initiatives, I helped BayNode grow from 600 members to over 2000 members in less than two years. I stepped down as organizer in December 2015 as I moved to Philadelphia. - Director, ASTi LabsAdvanced Simulation Technology incJan 2013 - May 2014 (1 year 5 months)I led the initiative to create ASTi Labs, the future technology group of Advanced Simulation Technology inc. Our focus was exploring exploring scalable cloud technologies, development process optimizations, game development as well as evaluating new marketplaces for existing products.
I located and secured a lease for new office space, hired the development team, and was the point of contact with senior leadership at ASTi. Additionally, I spearheaded technical mentorship, product development, marketing research, and software development.
Some of ASTi Lab's projects included:
● SpeakIt - Web-based voice communication system for developers and marketing professionals. This project was ultimately spun off to create - Director of Product DevelopmentAdvanced Simulation Technology incJun 2012 - Oct 2013 (1 year 5 months)I worked with cross-functional teams to bridge the gap between higher-fidelity training systems and serious games in the Live-Virtual-Constructive training environments by leveraging our R&D's technical innovation to meet our customer's ever-changing requirements.
- Product ManagerAdvanced Simulation Technology incJun 2011 - Jun 2012 (1 year 1 month)Pitched business & product idea to executive team. Launched R&D effort behind ASTi's next-generation COTS communication platform, Voisus.
I also developed our first integrated serious game communication system for Bohemia Interactive's Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) which opened the door to new markets for our Voisus system. - Project EngineerAdvanced Simulation Technology incMay 2009 - Jun 2011 (2 years 2 months)I specialized as a customer-facing engineer building sound and communications models using ASTi's Telestra 4 product suite. Projects included sound recreation and communication simulation for the following training devices: C-130, C-27J, T-50, Lynx, Korean Utility Helicopter, P8, CH53-E, P3, and Coast Guard Aircrew Weapons Trainer.
My primary tasks included:
● Defining requirements and engineering tasks
● Implementing custom models
● Training customers' engineers
● Delivering and installing products with customer models
● Supporting customers post-installation
I was also involved in internal product development including software engineering and testing, sales and marketing, and account m
Education
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- B.S, Electrical and Computer EngineeringCarnegie Mellon UniversityJan 2005 - Jan 2009 (4 years 1 month)
- BHigh SchoolBuckingham Browne NicholsJan 2001 - Jan 2005 (4 years 1 month)
Publications
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- OIntroduction to CoreOS: Learn to Deploy, Monitor, and Scale Containerized ApplicationsOCTIn this Introduction to CoreOS training course, expert author Ross Kukulinski will teach you how to deploy, monitor, and scale containerized applications. This course is designed for users that are already familiar with running applications with containerization technologies.
You will start by learning the basics of CoreOS, then jump into learning about CoreOS subsystems. From there, Ross will teach you how to launch a development CoreOS cluster, including how to install dependencies, boot your first cluster, and troubleshoot CoreOS services. This video tutorial also covers how to deploy a database-backed web application. Finally, you will learn advanced topics, including firewalls, EC2 security groups, and building on CoreOS.