David Kitchen (London, UK) +44.7740949212 david.kitchen@gmail.com https://david.kitchen https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidk https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=buro9 https://github.com/buro9 Last updated: 2020-11-05 Summary ------- Engineer since 1996. Managing people and projects since 2010. Highly technical engineering manager who remains involved in technical direction but cares deeply about personal development of engineers. In the last decade technical focus has been on databases, telemetry, privacy and security products such as firewalls, protection against denial of service, matching traffic, and building products that protect end customers and users. In the same period management focus has been on mental health, diversity, and personal development of direct reports. Experience ---------- ### Grafana Labs, Director of Engineering, June 2020 to present. Building and managing the teams responsible for Prometheus, Cortex, Loki and Tempo. This is a set of teams whose focus is common; databases for system telemetry and observability. ### Cloudflare, Engineering Manager, November 2014 to June 2020 Technical vision and management for the firewall including the WAF, DDoS, and customer configured firewall via a Wireshark Display Filter syntax. Managed the DDoS, Firewall, WAF and UI teams, with peak direct reports being 12 and average being 8. Defined the 1:1 process, supported directs through career progression, and focused on hiring from under represented groups. During my tenure the company went through extraordinary growth which meant building 3 teams from scratch, and took over a newly formed team. ### Microcosm, CTO, September 2012 to October 2014 Founder and CTO of a technical startup company focused on building a PaaS solution for discussion-based communities. Led product, dev, marketing and sales whilst managing the technical direction and implementation. In under 2 years we built a new product and grew to 50k+ passionate users. ### Yell Labs, Global Architect, April 2010 to February 2012 Leading a research and development lab to discover new opportunities for the company and to demonstrate how to exploit these. Hired and managed a large team, launched several new products including mobile applications and big data applications. Tech lead for 20 engineers. ### Pcubed, Technical Architect, August 2003 to April 2010 Technical Architect leading a team of developers to produce a set of solutions across retail, finance and manufacturing verticals to solve client specific problems. Deeply involved in defining and executing a full SDLC and delivering large projects to clients ahead of schedule and under budget. Managed 6 people, tech lead for the company. Worked closely with Microsoft through a DAC (Developer Advisory Council) position. Key clients include Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, Criminal Justice IT, Home Office. ### Premium TV, Senior Engineer, May 2001 to August 2003 Senior Engineer delivering a video CMS system for Football and sports sites in the UK. Produced the first successful subscription video site on the web, and built all applicable systems for this. ### BT Openworld (British Telecom), Senior Developer, August 2000 to May 2001 Senior Developer with sole responsibility for creating and delivering the consumer portal and CMS. Core developer for the BTinternet consumer portal. ### Jeepster Records, December 1996 to August 2000 Established their online presence, built a full ecommerce site, won a Brit Award with Belle & Sebastian. Nominations for Best Music Website from music press within the UK and globally. Built the stock management, financial reporting, online shop and mail order business. Education --------- Master of Science (Merit), Computer Science, 2010 Birkbeck, University of London Project: "An Approach to Reporting Against Geographically Distributed Semi-Structured Data" Professional Groups ------------------- CITP (Chartered IT Professional) with the BCS (British Computer Society) ACM Member (Association of Computer Machinery) Member of ACM SIGACT (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) Member of ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) Patents ------- Patents granted or in application for inventions ranging from: customer loyalty systems, web security within a CDN, CDNs that dynamically modify content, web traffic limiting, and web performance optimisation. * WO2013008017 Secure collection and validation of loyalty points * US20170118299 Methods and apparatuses for providing a desired portion of a data object document * US9961066 Method and apparatus for limiting traffic rate to an origin server * US10171446 Method and apparatus for limiting traffic rate to an origin server * US10733307 Transparent inspection of responses from origin servers to identify protected data Out-of-Hours ------------ Cyclist. Core developer of Microcosm which hosts over 300 cycling communities, including https://www.lfgss.com/ and numerous small forums and community web sites. Total +250k users per month as of September 2016. https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday Author of the HTML sanitizer for Go. Which protects against XSS in user generated content.