Lisa Tagliaferri

AI agent infrastructure · developer tooling · open source · access

Lisa Tagliaferri has spent a decade building developer infrastructure, open source software, and technical education at startups on the frontier of AI. The thread running through it all is access: when more people can participate in knowledge production, the work gets better.

She started applying machine learning to historical corpora back in 2015, using computational methods to surface patterns across large sets of specialized texts that would be impractical to trace by hand. A few years later, in 2019, she wrote a book introducing ML to a broader audience. Her work has long sat at the intersection of disciplines, moving between the humanities, computer science, and software infrastructure.

She has led teams at Chainguard, Sourcegraph, and DigitalOcean. As Senior Director of Developer Enablement at Chainguard, she built Chainguard Academy and the developer programs around it, treating them as measurable go-to-market functions for enterprise customers. She also pushed early on making technical documentation AI-readable, including machine-readable sitemaps, semantic metadata, and LLM-friendly endpoints, because if developers are coding with AI assistants and agents, and those tools can't reach accurate docs, the developers themselves are locked out. Access for the human depends on access for the agent now.

At DigitalOcean as Senior Manager of Community, she led a nine-person team through the company's 2021 NYSE listing. The nearly 200 tutorials she authored on Python, Linux, and cloud infrastructure have drawn over 45 million readers, a scale that only matters because each of those readers got a real foothold into something that used to be gatekept. She also co-developed the Linux Foundation's Sigstore course (LFS182x) on edX and wrote How To Code in Python, a free, openly licensed companion to the tutorial work.

She is a maintainer on Sigstore, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project for software supply chain security, and is working on SPIRITENGINE, an open source organization publishing agent collaboration primitives and structural code analysis libraries.

Recent talks include Growing in Cloud Native and What History Can Teach Us About Open Source Security, both at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and Securing MCP Servers in Production at the Linux Foundation's MCP Dev Summit.

Lisa holds a PhD from the City University of New York and an MSc in Computer Science from Queen Mary, University of London. She is currently co-editing Navigating Digital Humanities Careers Beyond the Ivory Tower for the University of Minnesota Press, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, a fitting project, since her own path out of the ivory tower has been the argument all along. She held postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti, and was a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University, where she taught several graduate seminars in Digital Humanities.