The OpenSearch Ambassador Program has evolved from a targeted founding group into a vibrant global force. Since its launch in fall 2025, the program has expanded to over 30 members, with 11 new leaders joining our ranks today. This growth reflects a community showing up everywhere, from organizing local meetups and user groups to mentoring contributors and sharing technical expertise on global stages and podcasts. Region by region, these ambassadors are the human heartbeat of the OpenSearch ecosystem.
The response to our August 2026 application cycle provided a clear signal of the project’s maturity. More than 125 practitioners stepped forward to lead, reflecting a deep-seated commitment to the project’s long-term health. This level of engagement mirrors the project’s broader trajectory, surpassing 2 billion downloads and climbing past 3,000 individual contributors across 140 repositories.
These applicants represent a collective investment in the future of the OpenSearch ecosystem. People aren’t raising their hands for a title, but for the opportunity to actively shape where this technology goes next, deepening the bench of advocates who are driving the project forward through community-led momentum.
Meet the new ambassadors
The people joining this round come from different regions, industries, and technical disciplines, yet each one has already left a mark on how the OpenSearch community grows, whether through code, content, or the connections they’ve built.
Kushi Chhillar
Khushi Chhillar is the co-lead of the OpenSearch Delhi User Group. By day, she works as a systems engineer focusing on eBPF, kernel-level observability, and 5G core networking. Beyond her primary role, Khushi organizes CNCF meetups, writes technical blogs, and actively supports the open-source community in India. She specializes in transforming complex infrastructure signals into clear, actionable insights and is passionate about search, telemetry, and community building.
Maria Pina Di Cataldo
Maria Pina Di Cataldo is a Community Strategist and Event Manager at SEACOM and an OpenSearch Ambassador based in Italy. She coordinates the OpenSearch communities in Milan and Rome, bringing together users, contributors and technology professionals to share knowledge, build relationships and grow the local OpenSearch ecosystem.
She has been building technology communities for more than 15 years, including XStreamDataLab, which she has coordinated since 2014. She is also a co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Italy and previously co-organized Kubernetes Community Days Italy, contributing to the growth of Italy’s cloud native and open source ecosystem.
Her approach to community building is strongly people-centered: she believes technology communities grow when people feel welcome, able to contribute and connected to one another. She also supports initiatives addressing the gender gap in technology and is part of the collective behind the Manifesto for the Equality of Girls and Women in Technology.
Brian Graf
Brian Graf is Senior Developer Advocate at NetApp Instaclustr. His work with OpenSearch spans across many areas with the latest focus on new feature releases, vector and hybrid search, and RAG. He shares that work through conference talks, YouTube walkthroughs, blog posts, and community discussions.
Brian is a 4x Microsoft MVP and 7x VMware vExpert. Brian has delivered more than 130 conference and user group talks, podcasts, and webinars throughout his time at AWS and VMware. He lives in Utah with his wife and seven kids, who get all of his time when he is not working.
Trey Grainger
Trey Grainger is the founder of Searchkernel, where he helps companies push the frontier of AI Search, building on open source technologies like OpenSearch. He is the author of the books AI-Powered Search and Solr in Action, maintains the AI-Powered Search Community, and is a top instructor on Maven.com, where his live training reaches thousands of search and AI engineers each year. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, and Director of Engineering at CareerBuilder. Trey has worked in information retrieval since 2008, contributing research, open source code, and hundreds of public talks at the intersection of search and AI.
West Kim
West Kim is an AI Specialist SA at Amazon Web Services, helping build systems that leverage AI to find and utilize data more effectively. Drawing on his previous experience developing search services in e-commerce, he has expanded into the information retrieval domain, supporting the design of higher-accuracy search systems. He also provides specialized support for OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Service, and contributes to community development.
Ramya Ravi
Ramya Ravi, Developer Advocate – AI and Open Source at NetApp Instaclustr, is a passionate content creator and AI enthusiast who thrives on exploring emerging trends, building communities, and attending tech conferences. With expertise in Python, TypeScript, C/C++, and AI/ML libraries like scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face, Ramya brings a wealth of technical knowledge to her role. Previously, as a Developer Relations Engineer at Intel, she focused on AI/ML solutions, creating impactful technical content including blogs, demos, and videos. Ramya also spearheaded the growth of Intel’s developer community on Reddit and Discord, building it from the ground up.
Seema Saharan
Seema Saharan is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Autodesk and a CNCF Ambassador. She’s a regular speaker at KubeCon and OpenSearchCon, and co-organizes CNCF Jaipur. She’s excited to bring that same community energy to the OpenSearch Ambassador program.
Aswath Srinivasan
Aswath Srinivasan is a Senior Search Engine Architect at Amazon Web Services currently based in Munich, Germany. With close to two decades of experience in various search technologies, Aswath currently focuses on OpenSearch. He is a search and open-source enthusiast and helps customers and the search community with their search problems.
David Tippett
David Tippett is the founder and CEO of Relevan, an agent-first search platform built on OpenSearch that learns from how AI agents search and improves relevance over time. Before founding Relevan, David worked on search at GitHub, helping evolve search systems spanning billions of documents and advance the company’s semantic and vector search capabilities. He previously served as a Senior Developer Advocate for OpenSearch at AWS, helping developers and organizations build scalable search applications. David is passionate about search relevance, open source, and making sophisticated search infrastructure accessible to teams without dedicated search engineers.
Sagar Utekar
Sagar Utekar is a Site Reliability Engineer at CrowdStrike, specializing in cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and observability. A CNCF Ambassador, Docker Captain, and Kubestronaut, Sagar is passionate about building resilient systems and sharing cloud-native knowledge at scale. He runs a popular DevOps and SRE newsletter on LinkedIn and hosts technical certification prep series to help engineers level up their skills. Sagar actively leads local tech meetups, mentors emerging talent through community hackathons, and speaks at global open-source conferences. Outside of work and community building, he enjoys weightlifting and exploring historic forts.
Jeff Zemerick
Jeff Zemerick is an independent search and cloud consultant and a maintainer on multiple OpenSearch repositories, where he helps teams measure search relevance and get the most out of OpenSearch. He is PMC Chair of Apache OpenNLP, an Apache Software Foundation member, and the owner of a stylish AWS Gold Jacket. Outside of technology, he is a wilderness guide and a Wilderness First Responder.
What this means for OpenSearch
Scaling to over 30 ambassadors is a strategic milestone in the project’s maturity. These leaders are the ones in the trenches, answering complex technical questions in community channels, running hands-on workshops, and producing the content that makes OpenSearch accessible to new audiences. By moving from users to contributors and now to formal ambassadors, they represent the widening pipeline of talent that keeps the ecosystem healthy. Their impact is felt in the mentorship of newcomers and the cross-industry connections that ensure OpenSearch remains a community-driven project.
What’s next
Thanks to everyone who applied for this cycle. Applications are now accepted on a rolling, year-round basis, with our next review taking place in February 2027. In the meantime, keep an eye on the OpenSearch blog and social channels. We will be highlighting these ambassadors and the work they are doing across the community!
If you’re interested in becoming a future OpenSearch Ambassador, here’s how to apply!
