RISE Technical Lead Winners for 2026-2027 Election
Congratulations to those elected to be technical leads for RISE Project technical working groups. Your effort and leadership make it possible for RISE to support and extend the RISC-V software ecosystem.
| Working Group | Lead | Bio |
| System Libraries | Ruinland Chuan-Tzu Tsai, Andes | Ruinland is an open-source software developer with six years of experience in system software/library projects. Currently serving at Andes Technology, his focus lies in operating systems, such as Android and C runtime libraries, and system libraries including musl-libc, glibc and other fundamental runtimes. He also possesses in-depth knowledge of Linux, FreeBSD, and is a veteran on bootstrapping Linux Distributions. |
| Simulator / Emulator | Daniel Barboza, Qualcomm | Daniel Barboza works with QEMU hardware emulation and virtualization since 2017. He has 10 years of PowerPC background and is working with RISC-V since early 2023. He’s also a committer in the libvirt project and has contributions in the Linux Kernel, most of them in the KVM subsystem.” |
| Language Runtimes | Jeff Law, Qualcomm | Jeff is an open source developer at Qualcomm with decades of experience in compilers and associated runtime systems. Jeff also has extensive experience in software ecosystem building. |
| Kernel KVM | Sunil V L, Qualcomm | Sunil is a software engineer with rich experience in server firmware and OS. He has been involved with RISC-V for the last 5+ years. Currently maintains EDK2 for RISC-V, ACPI subsystem in qemu and linux kernel. |
| Firmware | Shatrunjay Prabhat, Google | Shatrunjay is a Silicon Design Engineer at Google with a background in SoC design and integration. While his primary expertise lies in hardware, He has a deep-seated interest in firmware and compiler development and is eager to apply my architectural knowledge to these areas while contributing to the open-source ecosystem. |
| Distro Integration | Brian Harrington, RedHat | Redbeard is currently the tech lead for RISC-V at Red Hat.
Noteworthy accomplishments in his previous roles include serving as Chief Architect at CoreOS, where he led the development of a cohesive vision across major projects like etcd, rkt, and Kubernetes. At Red Hat, he was Principal Product Manager for Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh (Istio.io). Redbeard has been recognized for his contributions to the open-source community, particularly through his work on CoreOS technologies that were later open-sourced and contributed to the Linux Foundation and CNCF. In addition to his technical roles, redbeard has been involved in various community engagements, such as being a running the vendor area at DEF CON and Security Lead at Shmoocon, showcasing his commitment to security and community involvement. His expertise in distributed systems and open-source technologies has made significant impacts in the industry, contributing to the advancement of cloud-native applications and infrastructure. |
| Compilers and Toolchains | Peter Bergner, Tenstorrent | Peter Bergner leads the RISC-V toolchain team at Tenstorrent, which focuses on developing and optimizing GCC, LLVM, GLIBC, binutils, OpenBLAS and Eigen for RISC-V. Before joining Tenstorrent, he spent nearly 30 years at IBM, working in a variety of areas, including porting Linux and GLIBC to 64-bit Power, leading the Blue Gene/L compiler and runtime library development team and 20 years as the GCC and toolchain lead for the Linux on Power development team. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, earning a Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. |
| Security Software | Robin Randhawa, SiFive | I work for SiFive at Cambridge, UK, as a Senior Director for System Software Architecture. My primary focus is on Security and Safety design patterns. I work with CPU and system designers to ensure that SiFive’s software and hardware portfolio has best in class security and safety.
I’ve been in the systems software industry for 25 years and have worked for MIPS and Arm before my current job. I spent 15 years at Arm building up open source teams working on everything from firmware, the Linux kernel, Android and Vehicle Autonomy Control. I’m fond of operating system architecture and spend my spare time tinkering with FreeBSD, Redox and custom kernels on my collection of hardware. I’m very fond of the Rust programming language and also play with Nim, V and Zig. My dream is to define a custom CPU instruction set, design a CPU using it, build a simulator, a compiler toolchain and finally boot Linux on it. Not sure if I’ll ever get around to it but always aim high eh ? 🙂 When not nerding out (!) I like to travel, read, play video games and chill with my family. |
| Developer Infrastructure | Hai Bi, Google | Hai is an open-source software developer with seven years of experience in system software projects. Currently serving at Google, his focus lies in power system such as battery management and Rust libraries. He also possesses in-depth knowledge of digital circuit hardware and was an electrical engineer for more than 10 years. |
| Developer Infrastructure | Puneetha Ramachandra, Google | Puneetha Ramachandra is a Software Engineer at Google with over a decade of industry experience. She specializes in board bring-up, Devicetree, developer tooling, and hardware orchestration, focusing on the low-level infrastructure that powers modern operating systems.
She built the remote hardware board farm and developer labs for the Fuchsia Operating System, streamlining device bring-up and ensuring toolchain parity across diverse architectures. |
| AI/ML | Hongbin Zhang, ISCAS | Hongbin Zhang leads the RISC-V AI Infrastructure team at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS). He is the initiator of Buddy Compiler, an AI compiler project for RISC-V, and is currently building the RuyiAI software stack for RISC-V to support practical and scalable AI deployment. He is a member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) of RISC-V International and has been working with his team to advance the RISC-V AI software ecosystem. |
| AI/ML | Chad Norvell, Google | With more than a decade of experience in the embedded systems domain, Chad Norvell is currently focused on the development of next-generation operating systems at Google. Contributing to core projects like Fuchsia and Pigweed, Chad has a history of enhancing developer velocity—most notably through his creation of a class-leading IDE for the Pigweed ecosystem. He is now working on the integration of agentic AI into the systems development process, advancing the state of how foundational software is engineered and maintained. |
| AI/ML | Min Hsu, SiFive | Min-Yih “Min” Hsu is a compiler engineer at SiFive. He has been contributing to LLVM for over 5 years. He served on the program committee for multiple LLVM Developers’ Meetings. Min is currently focusing on optimizing low-level code generation in IREE and PyTorch targeting RISC-V AI accelerators. |
