I'm an engineer living in San Francisco, CA.

Until recently I was a Principal Engineer at Rollbar working in back-end software development and DevOps/SRE as well as data engineering and analysis. I was with Rollbar for seven and a half years as the company grew from 3 to around 100 employees. I left Rollbar in April 2022 and since then I've been taking time to relax, reflect and research. I'm interested in the role system modeling plays in engineering in general and DevOps/SRE specifically.

I've been involved in software development and tech since 1983 when I had my first part-time jobs as a high school student writing food service management software in BASIC for Houk & Soles in Pentwater, Michigan and doing contract drafting work for a local solar panel installation company.

After receiving a Master's in Aerospace Engineering from Michigan in 1990 I started my career at NASA Langley Space Center in Hampton, Virginia working on structural analysis and design of the International Space Station. During my time with NASA I also spent a year at Stanford in the Engineering-Economic Systems program and completed a second Master's degree.

After NASA I joined StatDesign, a small consulting firm in Michigan working with Ford to apply statistical Design of Experiments (DOE) methods to computer modeling and simulation. Eventually I made the move to California where I managed the consulting and support team at Knowledge Revolution, a small software company making mechanical system modeling and simulation software.

In 1996 my career pivoted from mechanical engineering to software engineering and operations when I co-founded InGenius, a small start-up that built web content monitoring services in the very early days of the Internet. InGenius was acquired in early 2000, but sadly the acquiring company didn't survive much beyond the bursting of the dot-com bubble in late 2000.

Since then I’ve alternated between consulting and permanent roles in software development, product management, data engineering & analysis, and DevOps/SRE at NetGravity, Personify, Jigsaw, Change.org, SoFi, and Rollbar.

For more details, you can check out my LinkedIn profile. You can also follow me on Twitter (@kshep).