I am a hardworking person who enjoys solving problems. I enjoy programming, and write free, open source software in my free time. I have experience working in teams as a force multiplier with expertise in designing, implementing and maintaining reliable, performant and efficient systems.

Offer Guidelines

I am open to interesting opportunities but receive an overwhelming number of low-quality bulk offers. Please observe the following rules or I will ignore your offer:

The offer must be personalized. Reference my current work and my website (kevincox.ca).
Do not send more than one email. Trust me, I got it. Assuming that you are following these rules I will respond, even if just to say that I am not interested. If you are sure you are following these rules feel free to send a single follow up after at least 30 days. Other than this exception all ping, reminder or "to make sure this didn't get caught in your spam filter" emails will be reported as spam.
Please do not contact me with cryptocurrency and blockchain related offers. I'm sorry, but please realize that this industry is mostly scams and I can not invest the time to thoroughly investigate each company that reaches out.

Work Experience

Technology Lead, Obscura

June 2024 - Present

Led the Obscura VPN engineering team to design, develop and launch the innovative provable-privacy Obscura VPN product including infrastructure, backend, website and client apps on various operating systems.

Founding Engineer, Plato

December 2022 - April 2024

Architecture design and full-stack software development of the Plato no-code platform.

Founder, FeedMail

November 2021 - Present

Created and operated FeedMail.

Various Contributions, Nix

September 2016 - Present

nixpkgs committer.
Member of the Nix RFC Steering Committee.

Engineering, Yugabyte

April 2021 - November 2022

Architected, implemented and launched Yugabyte's hosted database service cloud.yugabyte.com
After launch drove implementation of many capability, reliability and cost improvements.

Senior SRE, Instacart

March 2020 - April 2021

Improving incident response procedures to reduce impact of incidents.
Advising the design of critical storage systems to improve reliability.
Implementing automated disaster recovery and test environment management to provide faster recovery of unexpected disasters and improving developer velocity.

Senior SRE, Google

August 2016 - February 2020

Improved resource usage and reduced latency variance for a number of Google Ads services.
Drove the development and adoption of standardized set of release tooling across Google Ads.
Led training of new SREs in the EMEA training hub.

Older Experience

Software Developer, Shopify

May 2015 - April 2016

I worked with Shopify's Data Team where we built and maintained tools to analyze Shopfiy's many data sources. These tools were used by our data scientists to create valuable insights for the company.

Participant, Google Summer of Code

May 2014 - August 2014

Over the summer I worked with both the Wireshark and Ceph projects to add Ceph protocol dissection support to Wireshark. The project was successful and the code is now part of the Wireshark project.

Bachelor of Software Engineering, Carleton University

September 2012 - June 2016

Skills

Expert in distributed systems, especially knowledge in designing reliable and performant systems.
Top level software developer, including the design of maintainable code bases as well as solid understanding of complex algorithms.
Strong ability to select the correct balance between cost and effort. Including scoping out roadmaps and prioritizing the highest impact work.

As an enthusiast I have a wide knowledge of many tools and systems such that it is impractical to list them all here. Just let me know what technologies you use when you reach out and I can describe my experience level.