# Kai Siren

I'm **Kai Siren** (preferred name), AKA **Lynn Conway** (legal name). I’m a platform engineer with 13 years of experience building high-impact systems that empower engineering teams.

I have recent experience working with LLM-based systems and AI-assisted workflows, focusing on integrating them into existing platforms in a reliable and observable way. This includes designing systems that help teams experiment with and adopt AI without compromising production quality.

I'm proficient in six programming languages, with Python, Go, and JavaScript as my strongest. I have hands-on experience deploying to AWS, GCP, and Azure, including designing multi-cloud environments. Across technologies and cloud platforms, I specialize in meeting engineers where they are and helping teams move faster and more effectively.

Throughout my career, I've been primarily responsible for implementing operations systems such as application monitoring, data pipelines, and deployment tooling from scratch. This hands-on experience has honed my skills as an IC engineer, and I also managed a small team at EnergyHub.

Outside work, I enjoy gaming, game development, gardening, and crafts. I also manage a game server, a unique intersection of my personal and professional interests.

// linkedin.com/in/coilysiren
// github.com/coilysiren
// coilysiren.me
// email: coilysiren@gmail.com
// location: East Bay, CA
// US Citizen

## Skills

- **Languages**: Python, Golang, NodeJS, Ruby, Java, PHP
- **Public Clouds**: AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean
- **Compute**: Kubernetes, Serverless, EC2, ECS, Batch, Docker, Linux
- **CI/CD**: Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, GitHub Actions
- **IaC**: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Packer, Pulumi, K8S
- **Observability**: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, Cloudwatch, New Relic
- **Infosec**: ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, NIST 800-53

## Experiences

[Kapwing](https://www.kapwing.com/) // **Senior Software Engineer** // San Francisco // 2025 - Present
*Python, NodeJS, K8S, Terraform, GCP, New Relic, OpenAI Codex*

- Improve dockerized python startup time performance by ~2x
- Build out video processing functionality with ffmpeg and puppeteer
- Design agentic workflows that leverage o11y tooling to fix bugs

[Nava](https://www.navapbc.com/)  // **Principal Infrastructure Engineer** // Remote // 2023 - 2025
*Python, Java, Terraform, AWS, NIST 800-53, New Relic*

- Deploy a government website for the US Department of Health and Human Services
- Improve upon backend applications written in Python and Java
- Remediate security vulnerabilities to maintain NIST 800-53 compliance
- Deploy a Metabase BI dashboard for data analytics and reporting

[Textio](https://textio.com/)  // **Staff Infrastructure Engineer** // Remote // 2022 - 2023
*Python, Golang, Typescript, Datadog, Airflow, AWS, Azure, Azure OpenAI, SOC 2*

- Deploy Airflow with a SQLMesh orchestration layer for data science workflows
- Deploy Azure OpenAI (i.e., ChatGPT) with a multi-cloud BGP VPN to AWS
- Migrate monitoring systems to a customized Datadog and Fluent-bit setup
- Build Python data pipelines for customer data reporting systems

[EnergyHub](https://www.energyhub.com/)  // **DevOps Engineering Manager** // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 - 2022
*Engineering Manager / Tech Lead of a team of 2 ~ 4 people*

-  Hire a DevOps team and craft the role to operate distinctly from product engineers
- Manage security policy and practice for day-to-day workflows and significant incidents

[EnergyHub](https://www.energyhub.com/)  // **Senior DevOps Engineer** // Brooklyn, NY // 2021
*Python, Java, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog, MongoDB, AWS, AWS EC2, SOC 2*

- Stabilize Ansible deployment tooling and upgrade it to industry standards
- Upgrade internal systems to production-grade variants (ex. MongoDB Atlas)
- Perform SOC 2 control remediations and deploy tooling around them

[Bluelink](https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluelinkorg/posts/?feedView=all)  // **Senior Backend Engineer** // Seattle, WA // 2020 - 2021
*Python, Java, GCP, Kubernetes*

- Build Java and Python backends on K8s / GCP for flowing data between partner APIs
- Ship data flow products purpose-built for Democratic candidates and progressives

[Textio](https://textio.com/)  // **Senior Infrastructure Engineer** // Seattle, WA // 2018 - 2020
*Python, Golang, NodeJS, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, AWS ECS, GDPR, ISO 27001*

- Build automation between 3rd party services to improve engineering velocity
- Design and socialize best practices in using day-to-day dev tooling
- Build maintainable and stable dev tooling customized to internal use cases

[Callisto](https://www.projectcallisto.org/) // **Senior Software Engineer** // San Francisco, CA // 2016 - 2018
*Python, NodeJS, Django, Heroku, TravisCI*

- Build and upgrade security application logic on the campus product
- Build security products in Python / NodeJS designed for client-side encryption
- Pair with cryptographers to prove out algorithms for novel cryptographic methods

[Ruby Together](https://rubycentral.org/) // **Open Source Software Engineer** // 2016
*Ruby, RubyGems, Bundler, GitHub*

[Harlot Media](https://harlot.media/)  // **Software Engineer** // 2015 - 2016
*JavaScript, PHP, Bash, Digital Ocean*

[Quirell](https://gitlab.com/collectqt/quirell)  // **Software Engineer** // 2014 - 2015
*Python, Flask, Neo4j, Heroku*

[NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/)  // **Engineering Student Ambassador** // 2012 - 2013
_Climate Science Education_

## Community & Open Source Leadership

[Write/Speak/Code](https://www.writespeakcode.com/) // **Seattle Chapter Organizer** // 2019 - 2020
*501(c)(3) nonprofit promoting visibility and leadership for technologists from marginalized genders*

[urfave/cli](https://github.com/urfave/cli) // **Maintainer** // 2020 - 2021
*Go CLI framework with broad downstream adoption across the Go ecosystem*