Éric Dumazet (author of the patch) is this highly productive guy working on network latency issues. He helped get CoDel into the kernel, and worked on TCP small queues (https://lwn.net/Articles/507065/) and the fair queue scheduler (https://lwn.net/Articles/564978/). Looking at the email addresses he used, I think he started working on the network stack on his spare time, while employed at SFR, a French telco. He implemented an in-kernel JIT for BPF (https://lwn.net/Articles/437981/), speeding up packet filtering; now that BPF is fast it is also used for performance profiling (filtering and aggregating in kernel) and syscall filtering.

There are of course others working in these areas, but I think Google has been going after them: Van Jacobson is a high-profile example. Dave Taht is still subsiding on ramen though (https://www.patreon.com/dtaht).