Kai Siren

Staff platform engineer building governed AI systems and developer infrastructure.

I'm Kai Siren (preferred name), AKA Lynn Conway (legal name). I have more than ten years of experience building the systems other engineers rely on. I work across platform engineering, developer experience, observability, and production operations. The current edge of that work is the governed infrastructure around agents: context composition, bounded execution, MCP delivery, model routing, evaluation, and telemetry designed for machine consumers.

The throughline is leverage. I meet engineers where the work is, make the boundary visible, and remove friction between intent and ship. That has meant language-ecosystem tooling at Ruby Together, multi-cloud platforms at Textio, government infrastructure at Nava, and agentic debugging workflows at Kapwing.

My career has been mostly individual-contributor work, with a chapter managing a small DevOps team at EnergyHub. I am strongest in ambiguous systems work where architecture, reliability, and developer experience have to meet.

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

Open Source

  • Ward and agent-compose turn role, tool, and policy inputs into inspectable context, fixed execution workflows, least-access containers, and durable evidence.
  • Ward MCP derives bounded MCP and HTTP tools from policy. Agent Proxy routes local and hosted model traffic through one observable OpenAI-compatible surface.

Skills

  • Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript / Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP
  • Agent platforms: MCP, agent orchestration, context systems, evaluation, model routing, LLM APIs
  • Cloud and compute: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, serverless, EC2, ECS, Batch, Docker, Linux
  • Infrastructure as code: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Packer, Pulumi
  • Observability: OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Sentry
  • Security and governance: NIST 800-53, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, least-privilege tooling

Experiences

Kapwing // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco // 2025 - Present Stack: Python, Node.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP, New Relic, OpenAI Codex

  • Improve Dockerized Python startup performance by roughly 2x
  • Build video-processing systems with FFmpeg and Puppeteer
  • Design agentic debugging workflows that use production observability

Nava // Principal Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2023 - 2025 Stack: Python, Java, Terraform, AWS, NIST 800-53, New Relic

  • Deployed a government website for the US Department of Health and Human Services
  • Improved backend applications written in Python and Java
  • Remediated security vulnerabilities to maintain NIST 800-53 compliance
  • Deployed Metabase for analytics and reporting

Textio // Staff Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2022 - 2023 Stack: Python, Go, TypeScript, Datadog, Airflow, AWS, Azure, Azure OpenAI, SOC 2

  • Deployed Airflow with a SQLMesh orchestration layer for data-science workflows
  • Deployed Azure OpenAI through a multi-cloud BGP VPN to AWS
  • Migrated monitoring to a customized Datadog and Fluent Bit system
  • Built Python data pipelines for customer reporting systems

EnergyHub // DevOps Engineering Manager // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 - 2022 Stack: Engineering manager and technical lead for a team of 2 to 4

  • Hired a DevOps team and shaped a role distinct from product engineering
  • Managed security policy and practice for daily work and significant incidents

EnergyHub // Senior DevOps Engineer // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 Stack: Python, Java, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog, MongoDB, AWS, SOC 2

  • Stabilized Ansible deployment tooling and brought it to current standards
  • Upgraded internal systems to production-grade managed services
  • Performed SOC 2 control remediations and built supporting tooling

Bluelink // Senior Backend Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Python, Java, GCP, Kubernetes

  • Built Java and Python services on Kubernetes and GCP for partner API data flows
  • Shipped data-flow products for Democratic candidates and progressives

Textio // Senior Infrastructure Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2018 - 2020 Stack: Python, Go, Node.js, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, AWS ECS, GDPR, ISO 27001

  • Built automation across third-party services to improve engineering velocity
  • Designed and socialized practices for daily developer tooling
  • Built stable developer tools customized to internal use cases

Callisto // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco, CA // 2016 - 2018 Stack: Python, Node.js, Django, Heroku, Travis CI

  • Built and upgraded security application logic for the campus product
  • Built client-side encryption systems in Python and Node.js
  • Paired with cryptographers to prove out novel cryptographic methods

Ruby Together // Open Source Software Engineer // 2016 Stack: Ruby, RubyGems, Bundler, GitHub

Harlot Media // Software Engineer // 2015 - 2016 Stack: JavaScript, PHP, Bash, DigitalOcean

Quirell // Software Engineer // 2014 - 2015 Stack: Python, Flask, Neo4j, Heroku

NASA // Engineering Student Ambassador // 2012 - 2013 Stack: Climate science education

Community & Open Source Leadership

Write/Speak/Code // Seattle Chapter Organizer // 2019 - 2020 Stack: Nonprofit community supporting technologists from marginalized genders

urfave/cli // Maintainer // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Go CLI framework with broad downstream adoption

Also available as a PDF.