Tobias Knaup

Tobi Knaup is a German software engineer, entrepreneur, and cloud-native infrastructure pioneer, best known as co-founder of Mesosphere (now D2iQ) and a key early engineer at Airbnb.

He grew up in Germany and later earned both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in computer science from the Technical University of Munich.  Early in his career he focused on large-scale distributed systems and machine learning, doing research on internet-scale sentiment analysis that combined online knowledge, linguistic analysis, and ML techniques. 

Knaup moved to Silicon Valley and became one of the first engineers and a tech lead at Airbnb, where he helped architect and scale the company’s cloud infrastructure to support millions of users and rapid product growth. 

In 2013 he co-founded Mesosphere with Florian Leibert and Benjamin Hindman to commercialize technologies around Apache Mesos and container orchestration, helping enterprises run large-scale distributed applications. Mesosphere later rebranded as D2iQ, evolving into an enterprise Kubernetes platform company that focuses on “day-2 operations” and simplifying cloud-native adoption for Global 2000 and public-sector organizations. 

At D2iQ, Knaup served first as Chief Technology Officer and later as CEO and co-CEO, positioning the company as an independent Kubernetes provider and advocate for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies.  He is the primary author of Marathon, one of the earliest open-source container orchestrators, and co-creator of KUDO, a toolkit for building Kubernetes Operators, giving him a central role in the early evolution of container orchestration before Kubernetes became dominant. 

Following Nutanix’s acquisition of D2iQ, Knaup became Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, continuing his work on helping enterprises operate modern cloud-native platforms across multiple clouds. 

Across his career, Tobi Knaup has been recognized as a leading voice in DevOps, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud infrastructure, frequently writing and speaking about the challenges of cloud-native adoption, day-2 operations, and platform engineering for large enterprises.