# Kai Siren

I'm **Kai Siren** (preferred name), AKA **Lynn Conway** (legal name). I'm a platform engineer, ten-plus years in. I build the tools that make engineering teams faster. The current edge of that work is agentic dev tooling and observability designed for LLM consumers.

The bet I'm making: an LLM that's even slightly faster than a human at finding bugs wins, because it doesn't get bored and it improves each model release. The asymmetry compounds. So I design observability for that consumer - raw event streams accessible via MCP, not prettier human dashboards.

I work across Python, Go, and JavaScript primarily, with hands-on time across AWS, GCP, and Azure. The throughline across stacks isn't a specific technology, it's meeting engineers where they are and removing the friction between intent and ship.

My career arc has been mostly IC with a stretch managing a small DevOps team at EnergyHub. The work has consistently been platform work - the layer other engineers build on. Language-ecosystem dev tooling at Ruby Together, multi-cloud platforms at Textio, government infrastructure at Nava, and now developer leverage and agent ergonomics at Kapwing.

Outside work, I enjoy gaming, game development, gardening, and crafts. I also run a homelab and a public game server. Both serve as testbeds for the observability work I do professionally.

// 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*