Kevin Klein

Software Engineer

[email protected] | Hermosa Beach, CA

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Summary

Kevin Klein is a highly accomplished engineer with extensive experience in developing and scaling complex technical systems across various industries. Kevin describes himself as not just a full-stack engineer but a full lifecycle engineer, owning all aspects from design and development to testing, deploying, monitoring, and support. As the Head of Engineering at FLOWER CO., he successfully rebuilt and optimized a customer and admin website, reducing latency and enhancing reliability, as well as building an extensive set of tools to manage deploying, building local environments, and general development, reducing the need for developers to reference documentation. Kevin has a wide range of expertise spanning across multiple technologies, including PHP, React, Kubernetes, AWS, GraphQL, and REST APIs, as well as migrating legacy infrastructure to modern platforms.

Prior to this, he co-founded Obeo.io, where he developed an SMS marketing platform with real-time messaging and automation, and held engineering roles at Life360 and BloomThat, where he led the development of critical backend systems and large-scale e-commerce solutions. Before he started working in website engineering, Kevin worked in the television and advertising industries, supporting post-production systems, managing storage networks, and leading assistant editor teams to support editorial staff.

Experience

FLOWER CO.

Head of Engineering | Los Angeles, CA | February 2020 - Present

A leading cannabis delivery and wholesale company in California.

Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, React, Next.js, Vite, Java, Selenium, AWS, Terraform, Bash, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Chef

  • Hired in 2020 to rebuild the current customer and admin website to handle custom business logic, add new features, and to improve overall site reliability and reduce latency. During the rebuild process, I maintained and updated infrastructure to improve performance of the existing site built with an e-commerce CMS called Spree that was written in Ruby.
  • In 8 months, I was able to build and deploy a new, feature-consistent system built in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework and later upgraded the new system to integrate with Elasticsearch to improve customer and admin search performance and DynamoDB for high volume, low latency database operations.
  • Built out multiple custom admin dashboards for various job roles: picking and packing, sourcing product, wholesale, warehouse product intake, delivery/fulfillment, data analytics, and system monitoring.
  • Dealt with complex regulations and integrations with the California cannabis track and trace system Metrc.
  • Published and consumed multiple APIs for various services using both REST and GraphQL.
  • Built multiple brand websites using React that consumed internal GraphQL endpoints.
  • Migrated infrastructure from using Chef and AWS ASGs to having some services running on Docker on ECS and others running in a Kubernetes on EKS.
  • Built a robust Bash command-line tool for interacting with our local development environment and performing tasks like deploying to staging/production as well as accessing remote infrastructure.
  • Handled multiple database migrations, set up Redshift to centralize logs and bulk data for data analytics teams, built out Athena tables for data that was too large to store in Redshift, and maintained multiple ETL jobs.
  • Handled re-skinning the primary customer site to move acquired companies to our infrastructure, as well as building out tools for newly acquired companies to manage fulfillment.
  • Dealt with hiring a large team of engineers and managing day-to-day work, one-on-ones, training, etc. Also handled performance reviews and layoffs.
  • Integrated AI into our everyday workflow to reduce the time it takes to build new features, launch new infrastructure, and reduce issues making it to production. Implemented AI PR reviews as a first pass to cut down on total time to get a review approved by a human.
  • Built out a large set of integration tests using Java and Selenium to monitor our staging and production environments and integrated the tests with NewRelic to monitor pass/fail, errors, and alerting.
  • Utilized New Relic for performance, application, and infrastructure monitoring, as well as basic integration tests to alert us to any possible issues in addition to PagerDuty to handle communicating alerts to on call engineers.
  • Utilized multiple backend database technologies to improve performance: DynamoDB for sessions, Redis for general and complex data caching, and Elasticsearch for improved searching and sorting.

Life360

Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | July 2019 - January 2020

Life360 is the leading family location safety app.

Languages: PHP, Java, Terraform, Bash, Go, Python, Prometheus, Docker, Chef

  • Hired as a Software Engineer and was quickly promoted, demonstrating exceptional performance and leadership potential. Was slated to become senior before leaving in January 2020 to move closer to family.
  • Was the primary backend engineer for a free crash detection notification system, ensuring reliable, timely, and accurate notifications for users.
  • Worked closely with product managers and engineering managers to report on project progress, timelines, and issues, facilitating effective communication and project delivery.
  • Coordinated with multiple app development teams to seamlessly integrate backend services into various applications, enhancing overall functionality and user experience.
  • Partnered with DevOps to launch new supporting infrastructure and scale existing systems, ensuring robust and efficient performance.
  • Collaborated with data analysts to review feature performance and collect data for reporting, contributing to informed decision-making and continuous improvement of products.

Obeo.io

Co-Founder | San Francisco, CA | October 2018 - February 2022

Obeo was an SMS marketing and communication platform that featured campaign sending, link tracking, 3rd-party integrations, public API, and message automation.

Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Terraform, Bash, MySQL, Google Cloud

  • Built with PHP and MySQL on Google Cloud App Engine.
  • Designed a versioned MySQL schema to provide streamlined updates to the database.
  • Utilized a Pub/Sub queue system to handle bulk processing, background jobs, and large imports (uploading contact lists, sending campaigns, etc.).
  • Implemented WebSockets with Node.js for live messaging and bulk tasks to update user interface elements in real-time.
  • Designed an event management system allowing events to trigger other actions in the system in real-time.
  • Wrote integrations to connect customer accounts to Slack, MailChimp, Shopify, and custom-built applications.
  • Created a local development environment using Chef and Vagrant to easily onboard new developers and to provide streamlined testing and deployment tasks.
  • Wrote PHPUnit tests to test models, controllers, and other critical system functions.
  • Used Bash scripts, Terraform, Chef, and Google App Engine to create staging and production environments with automated horizontal scaling.

BloomThat

Sr. Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | September 2013 - October 2018

BloomThat was a flower delivery startup that had a national presence with same-day and next-day delivery.

Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Terraform, Bash, MySQL, Chef

  • Custom-built e-commerce solution using PHP, MySQL, and hosted with Rackspace on custom servers.
  • Built and managed a large-scale administration and distribution system to fulfill thousands of orders through multiple vendors on a daily basis.
  • Created a vendor distribution app to assist farms in fulfilling orders. This system became a new standard that these farms now require from new retailers.
  • Created a customer support app to assist support representatives in spotting order issues and communicating with customers.
  • Used WebSockets to provide real-time dashboard updates for admin and fulfillment services.
  • Created an administration dashboard with billing and statistics for accounting.
  • Used Terraform, Chef, Jenkins, and Bash scripts to automate deployment, scaling, and system migration.
  • Managed other developers, delegating tasks and projects, reviewing work, conducting performance reviews, and handling layoffs.
  • Handled internal customer support, on-call scheduling, and disaster recovery plans.
  • Used New Relic to monitor system usage and spoke at a few conferences about how we utilized it.
  • As the first employee hired I designed and managed all of BloomThat's technical infrastructure. After the acquisition I helped oversee the technical transition to FTD and was the last employee to leave the company.

Previous Work History

TBWA\Chiat\Day (Media Arts Lab) & Nomad Editorial

AV Infrastructure Specialist | Santa Monica, CA | July 2010 – December 2011

Supported AV infrastructure relating to conference rooms and media displays and worked as a post-production systems admin, maintaining post-production infrastructure and SAN storage networks.

Game Show Network

Post-Production Systems Admin/Online Editor | Los Angeles, CA | January 2010 – May 2010

Online editor and post-production systems admin for the show "Instant Recall".

MCfilmworks

Post-Production Systems Admin/Online Editor/Lead Assistant Editor | Los Angeles, CA | July 2007 – January 2010

Managed post-production infrastructure, did online editing and QC before delivery to NOC, and managed assistant editors. Worked on shows for various networks, including GSN, BET, Discovery, HGTV, and TLC.