Following a successful inaugural year, the eBPF Foundation is once again inviting applications for its 2026 Community & Advocacy Fellowship Program, a program designed to reward and support innovative ideas that grow the eBPF ecosystem for an increasingly global and diverse set of users, contributors, and end users. The program’s goal is to cultivate a vibrant, skilled, and expanding global eBPF community by empowering key individuals to make significant contributions to the eBPF ecosystem.
The eBPF Foundation Community & Advocacy Fellowship award is a grant given to active members of the eBPF community who have made meaningful contributions to the eBPF ecosystem but are not paid to work on the project. During their time in the program, Fellows receive a monthly stipend and are expected to show progress towards their program goal.
Looking Back: Highlights from the Inaugural Fellowship
The first cohort of eBPF Community & Advocacy Fellows, announced in October 2025, spent six months deepening their contributions to the eBPF ecosystem:
- Teodor Janez Podobnik hosted three eBPF-focused podcast conversations (with guests from Oligo Security, Garnet, and Dynatrace), organized the first-ever eBPF Meetup in Slovenia, presented at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam on eBPF attack and defense techniques, gave local meetup talks on building eBPF-based firewalls and load balancers, and released new hands-on eBPF Coding Labs on the Iximiuz Labs platform including the eBPF Beginner Skill Path, eBPF CO-RE Skill Path, eBPF/XDP Network Skill Path, and a lab on building a minimal service mesh with eBPF and Envoy. He also carried out 1-on-1 mentorship with developers around the world, which directly shaped the topics covered in his coding labs.
- Yusheng Zheng, a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz and maintainer of eunomia-bpf, added nine new tutorials to the bpf-developer-tutorial covering recent kernel features (BPF Arena, Workqueues, struct_ops, dynptr) and expanded eBPF’s reach into GPU observability and AI infrastructure. Her fellowship work included research projects such as gpu_ext, NCCLbpf, and SysOM-AI (deployed across more than 80,000 GPUs at Alibaba), as well as AI-agent-focused work including AgentSight, ACRFence, AgentCgroup, and Schedcp. She also presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 and co-organized the inaugural AgenticOS workshop at ASPLOS 2026.
Program Details
The fellowship is a six-month grant for individuals who want to dedicate their time to growing and educating the eBPF community. As a Fellow, you’ll receive a monthly stipend of $1,500 USD and work toward specific program goals.
We’re looking for individuals who can help with things like:
- Creating educational materials like tutorials, guides, and example code in new languages.
- Translating documentation to make eBPF more accessible worldwide.
- Evangelizing eBPF at conferences and developing content for new language ecosystems.
If you have a project idea that will positively impact the eBPF community, we want to hear from you.
Who Can Apply?
The eBPF Foundation Fellowships application is open to anyone who will be over the age of 18 at the time of the grant award.
We welcome applications from prospective Foundation Fellows with different backgrounds from all over the world.
We cannot consider applications from those who are paid to work on eBPF full time.
Applicants should already have a track record of contributions to the eBPF ecosystem, whether through code, content, or community.
How to Apply
The application window is open from August 7 to September 11, 2026. Please complete the application form to be considered.
Fine Print
- Fellowships do not come with special eBPF project privileges.
- Fellows are required to set and meet specific milestones. At the midpoint and end of the program, Fellows will be asked to write a blog detailing their experience for possible publication on our website.
- Developed code as part of the program needs to be open sourced and ideally be upstreamed to the related projects. Educational materials and other non-code assets need to be made publicly accessible for everyone.
- 6 months from program start to finish date.
- Stipend of $1,500 USD per month.
- Fellows are required to sign a contractor agreement with the Linux Foundation and submit a monthly invoice to receive their stipend.
If there are any questions, please reach out to support@ebpf.foundation.