Brendan O’Leary has spent 15+ years in software, mostly at the intersection of developer tools, open source, and go-to-market.

Currently, he’s the Founding Developer Relations Engineer at Kilo Code, the most popular open source AI coding agent. Before that, he was VP of Developer Relations at Prefect, and before that he led Product Strategy and Community at ProjectDiscovery through their Series A.

At GitLab, Brendan was there from Series C through IPO. He started in Professional Services, moved into Product Management owning CI/CD (Verify), and ended up as a Staff Developer Evangelist. He helped build the developer program, ran the community strategy, and contributed to the growth story that took GitLab public.

He served on the CNCF Governing Board from 2020-2022, including a seat on the Compensation Committee. That gave him a front-row view of how open source governance actually works at scale. 

Brendan’s approach to DevRel: it's developer marketing. Developer adoption is the primary KPI. Everything he does—code, content, community—ladders up to that. He writes technical content, ships demos, speaks at conferences, and builds the systems that turn individual developers into advocates.

Earlier in Brendan’s career, he led release management and DevOps adoption at Orbis Technologies supporting SOCOM and Fortune 100 clients. That background taught him how to ship software when the stakes are real and the timelines don't move.