Hello! I am Kevin Simons, currently employed as a Senior Software Engineer II on the Platform Federal Engineering team at Grafana Labs. My experience is a mix of typical software engineering as well as a healthy dose of DevOps.

Some of my favorite projects I have been involved with include:

• Migrating our company workloads from an in-house container management application to running in AWS on their Elastic Kubernetes Service.
• Developing a job running service on top of the Kubernetes Job API to protect our Control Plane from becoming overloaded.
• Troubleshooting complex problems in a cloud environment
  • Issue with HSMs used for TLS termination
  • Large amounts of “random” HTTP disconnects
  • WebSocket disconnects through 2 cloud providers

In addition to the technical I enjoy teaching and collaborating across teams within a company. At Workiva as a Staff Engineer I,

• Started and maintain running “Infrastructure Game Days” to train our on-call engineers
• Started a cross-team Staff+ Engineering technical sync
• Started a community of practice for infrastructure to connect more with our stakeholders within the company and advance the infrastructure we all use

I enjoy solving technical problems, designing reliable systems, and working with people who love the same. I believe one of the most important qualities in an engineer is the ability to learn. My time working with infrastructure has led to constantly learning new systems and integrating them into our environment, sometimes within weeks. The field of software is constantly evolving and I enjoy improving along with it.