Grow your role

Strimzi welcomes contributions of all kinds. Whether you’re submitting code, writing docs, testing features, or answering questions in Slack, you’re part of the community. As you gain experience, you may want to take on a bigger role by helping review work, guiding others, or shaping the project’s direction. If that’s something you’re interested in, here’s how to take the next step.

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Start by contributing

Everyone starts somewhere — maybe by fixing a typo, improving documentation, testing a PR, or picking up a good start issue.

As you contribute more, you’ll become familiar with parts of the project, connect with other contributors, and develop a deeper understanding of how the project works.

Become a component owner

As you gain experience, you might naturally focus on a specific area — for example, documentation, CI tooling, or a particular component like the Kafka Bridge. You could become a component owner, taking shared responsibility for an area of the project.

Component owners help review pull requests, solve issues, answer questions, and guide improvements in their area of expertise.

Become a maintainer

Maintainers help lead the project. They take responsibility for overall direction and health, participate in decision-making, and help uphold our Code of Conduct and governance.

You don’t need to be a component owner first — some maintainers have contributed across multiple areas of the project.

If you're interested in becoming a maintainer, keep contributing — and let us know you're interested by emailing cncf-strimzi-maintainers@lists.cncf.io. We’re happy to help guide you to areas that need attention.

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You can read more about the formal roles and responsibilities of component owners and maintainers in the Strimzi Governance document.