Kevin
Smith

• Built Collabchek, a code analysis tool that reveals collaboration patterns in development workflows by analyzing pull requests and team interactions using AI-driven sentiment analysis, helping engineering leaders identify knowledge silos and optimize team performance
• Developing nib, an open-source CLI tool providing editorial infrastructure for fiction writers including project management, manuscript assembly, and continuity tracking; used to complete a 93,000-word novel
• Built Chamacs, a Go-based TUI chat client supporting multiple LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama) with MCP server integration and persistent memory management
• Built Memorit, a Go-based semantic memory system using vector embeddings with hybrid search combining vector similarity, conceptual matching, and keyword search for memory-augmented conversational AI

• Managed three engineering teams totaling 14 direct reports: Vertical Solutions, Design System UX, and Search
• Shipped ShareFile's first vertical solution on the company's proprietary platform, generating $500K in new ARR
• Built an AI agent workflow combining Claude and OpenAI with custom MCP servers and Block's Goose agent UI, adopted by the majority of engineering management and product management
• Developed custom MCP servers including a Jira interface with built-in ticket hierarchy summarization and a read-only Asana client
• Mentored peer managers and organized monthly lunch-and-learn knowledge sharing sessions

• Joined as an early engineering hire to gain hands-on experience with ML infrastructure, helping bring the company's first product to market
• Contributed to the open source project Metaflow including innovative event-driven workflow support on Kubernetes, bug fixes, and automated Python package builds and publishing on PyPI
• Built v1 of orchestrated training workflows on Kubernetes using Argo Workflows

(Formerly Pureport – acquired by Digital Realty Feb 2021)

• Reformed development and roadmap planning practices at Pureport, enabling teams to ship a major feature ahead of schedule and facilitating acquisition by Digital Realty
• Led 16 engineers across two teams as lead technical manager responsible for Digital Realty's first global network automation product targeting long-haul and LAN datacenter networks
• Reported directly to CTO with ultimate delivery responsibility; Service Fabric 1.0 deployed on-time in February 2022
• Used Airflow extensively as the platform's workflow execution engine
• Expanded development and SRE teams, hiring dedicated team managers for each
• Established product development best practices and improved cross-functional relationships with security, compliance, IT, and HR

• Managed 3 engineering teams totaling nearly 30 engineers during a period of explosive growth
• Improved development practices yielding smoother and more frequent deployments
• Implemented new roadmap process with product management for feature scoping and scheduling
• Rolled out formal engineering team manager role and established programs to develop technical and business leaders from within
• Scaled Mac build infrastructure from 120 nodes to over 300

• Led Real Time Bidding and Personalization teams deployed globally on AWS, integrating with over a dozen ad exchanges
• Operated Erlang-based bidders handling over 2,000 requests per second (~7 billion requests per month)
• Built and maintained data pipelines to collect bidding results and stream them back to the training environment, enabling the data science team to optimize bidding strategies
• Managed annual $6M AWS budget
• Used PrestoDB extensively for large-scale data querying across distributed datasets
• Built custom Python/Pandas tools for cost analysis, capacity planning, and usage prediction, several adopted by other teams

• Designed and built Cog, a chatops bot with ACL/RBAC support via custom DSL, first-class dev/test/production environments, and deep Docker integration; customers included Kickstarter
• Built on an Elixir core with a custom Docker integration in Go and a Markdown templating engine in C/C++ for performance

• Created Planet Labs' first SRE team, building the compute grid and storage infrastructure critical to downloading and processing satellite imagery
• Owned performance and availability of the company's main public site

• Led all product engineering efforts, collaborating with sales, marketing, and the Chef OSS community on roadmap definition and delivery
• Led rewrite of Chef Server enabling the company to move upmarket, directly securing two $1M+ ARR enterprise deals (Facebook, Riot Games)
• Grew product engineering from 8 to 50 engineers and created a UX practice
• Promoted majority of team leads and managers from existing employees