Why would it be "strange"? At the time I left Google it was 60K+ people. You'd need to be someone of Mike Burrows' or Jeff Dean's stature to even register on the radar.

I work at Google, I neither know Brendan Burns nor Mike Burrows. According to his LinkedIn Brendan was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, i.e. Level 7. That is not a particularly high position.

My previous manager was a Principle Engineer (Level 8). I am pretty sure no one here ever heard her name.

Most people who do follow the development of Kubernetes in the community do know him though. What matters is not whether people know him or not, just that Azure has done lot of cool things around k8s in the last few years and lot of top folks who are part of the community are working at Azure / Microsoft.

Mike Burrows keeps a very low profile but he was actively involved in the creation of Chubby along with the more... subtle... aspects of synchronization primitives. He also co-invented Burrows Wheeler encoding (bzip2 uses it). Google would not have been able to build its empire without his contributions.