We are pleased to share the results of the recent 2026 P4 Technical Steering Team (TST) Elections. Bili Dong (Google), Shweta Shrivastava (Intel), and Steffen Smolka (Google) have been elected to two-year terms.
The P4 community maintained strong momentum in 2025, marked by significant advancements from working groups and increased engagement through the annual P4 Workshop, regular virtual events, blogs, and publications. We anticipate an even more exciting year ahead. You can get involved and follow all the P4 updates for 2026.
About the Newly-Elected P4 TST Members
Bili Dong
Bili has participated in the P4 community since 2022 and been an active community member. Bili has 3.5 years of experience in industry working on programming networking offloads on programmable NICs (w/wo P4), and applying formal methods to automatically reason about packet forwarding behaviors of NICs and switches (w/wo P4).
Bili’s contributions to the P4 project include code contributions to P4C and BMv2; proposing and helping incubating the P4MLIR project; organization of P4’s participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 & 2025; and serving as mentors in several P4 GSoC projects.
In his role as a member of the P4 TST, Bili is seeking to evolve the open source P4 toolchain and the language itself if necessary to better support real-world programmable packet processor targets, both hardware and software. As part of that, Bili seeks to improve P4’s interoperability with other technologies, for example, allowing programming parts of the target in P4, while the rest in C++, as frictionless as possible. More experimentally, Bili also wishes to explore the ideas of P4 as intermediate representation (IR), and P4 as embedded domain specific language (eDSL).
Shweta Shrivastava
Shweta has worked with P4 for the past four years and has led multiple Intel projects involving P4-based offload of networking capabilities, including ACLs, load balancing, routing, forwarding, and connection tracking, onto the Intel IPU’s Packet Processing Pipeline. She has been leading development of offload solutions for high-speed dataplanes such as SONiC DASH and next-generation firewall capabilities on Intel IPUs, with a strong focus on scale and performance. Shweta presented Intel’s SONiC-DASH design and performance results at the P4 Workshop 2024.
In her role as a P4 TST member, Shweta seeks to drive broader P4 adoption by using learnings from her experience developing large-scale datapaths on Intel IPU to help bridge the gap between hardware IPU/SmartNIC implementations and portable P4 architectures. She also plans to focus on evolving these architectures to address advanced use cases, including multi-tenant deployments, AI/HPC networking, and next-generation telemetry.
Steffen Smolka
Steffen has been involved with P4 since 2016, when he interned at Barefoot Networks. He currently serves as co-chair of the P4 API Working Group.
For the past 6 years, Steffen has been leveraging P4 at Google, where he founded and leads the Automated Reasoning and Contracts for Networking (ARCNET) team. ARCNET uses P4 as a specification language and builds and applies tools that perform automated switch validation against such a given P4 spec — an approach known as P4-Based Automated Reasoning (P4-BAR) [learn more].
As a P4 TST member and active user of P4, Steffen can offer both an industrial/practical perspective (as a Google engineer) as well as an academic/theoretical perspective (having done a PhD in programming languages).
Steffen’s goals for his term on the P4 TST are to promote more industry involvement in the community, and continue increasing awareness around and momentum behind the usage of P4 as a specification language, beyond Google.
A big thank you to Nate Foster and Hari Thantry for their service and contributions over the past two years!
Interested in getting involved? P4 TST meetings are held monthly on the first Friday. Check out the full calendar of TST meetings, Working Groups, and upcoming events.
