Kai Ase Siren

Staff platform engineer building governed AI systems and developer infrastructure.

I'm Kai Ase Siren (preferred name), AKA Lynn Conway (legal name). I have more than ten years of experience building the systems other engineers rely on. I work across platform engineering, developer experience, observability, and production operations. The current edge of that work is the governed infrastructure around agents: context composition, bounded execution, MCP delivery, model routing, evaluation, and telemetry designed for machine consumers.

The throughline is developer infrastructure. That has meant language-ecosystem tooling at Ruby Together, multi-cloud platforms at Textio, government infrastructure at Nava, and agentic debugging workflows at Kapwing. I run a two-site homelab and a public game server, which is where the platform, reliability, and observability work gets tested outside a job.

My career has been mostly individual-contributor work, with a chapter managing a small DevOps team at EnergyHub. I am strongest in ambiguous systems work where architecture, reliability, and developer experience have to meet.

// https://linkedin.com/in/coilysiren // https://forgejo.coilysiren.me/coilysiren // https://github.com/coilysiren // https://coilysiren.me // email: coilysiren@gmail.com // location: East Bay, CA // US Citizen

Current Open Source

• umbra occludes CLIs and outbound requests behind declared policy: argv validation before exec, a per-invocation egress gate, a rotating audit log, and a public refusal taxonomy. mcp-beaver generates the guarded MCP server from that same policy artifact.
• housecast composes every agent role from one YAML roster and grades them from that same file, so the graded artifact and the shipped artifact are identical. agent-compose renders the bundle into harness surfaces, carrying no credential, no mount, and no command.

Skills

• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript / Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP
• Agent platforms: MCP, agent orchestration, context systems, evaluation, model routing, LLM APIs
• Cloud and compute: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, serverless, EC2, ECS, Batch, Docker, Linux
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Packer, Pulumi
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Sentry
• Security and governance: NIST 800-53, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, least-privilege tooling

Experiences

Kapwing // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco // 2025 - Present Stack: Python, Node.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP, New Relic, MCP, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code

• Improve Dockerized Python startup performance by roughly 2x
• Build an agent-facing MCP surface for a production media pipeline
• Design agentic debugging workflows with production observability

Nava // Principal Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2023 - 2025 Stack: Python, Java, Terraform, AWS, NIST 800-53, New Relic

• Deployed a government website for the US Department of Health and Human Services
• Improved backend applications written in Python and Java
• Remediated security vulnerabilities to maintain NIST 800-53 compliance
• Deployed Metabase for analytics and reporting

Textio // Staff Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2022 - 2023 Stack: Python, Go, TypeScript, Datadog, Airflow, AWS, Azure, Azure OpenAI, SOC 2

• Deployed Airflow with a SQLMesh orchestration layer for data-science workflows
• Deployed Azure OpenAI through a multi-cloud BGP VPN to AWS
• Migrated monitoring to a customized Datadog and Fluent Bit system
• Built Python data pipelines for customer reporting systems

EnergyHub // DevOps Engineering Manager // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 - 2022 Stack: Engineering manager and technical lead for a team of 2 to 4

• Hired a DevOps team and shaped a role distinct from product engineering
• Managed security policy and practice for daily work and significant incidents

EnergyHub // Senior DevOps Engineer // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 Stack: Python, Java, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog, MongoDB, AWS, SOC 2

• Stabilized Ansible deployment tooling and brought it to current standards
• Upgraded internal systems to production-grade managed services
• Performed SOC 2 control remediations and built supporting tooling

Bluelink // Senior Backend Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Python, Java, GCP, Kubernetes

• Built Java and Python services on Kubernetes and GCP for partner API data flows
• Shipped data-flow products for Democratic candidates and progressives

Textio // Senior Infrastructure Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2018 - 2020 Stack: Python, Go, Node.js, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, AWS ECS, GDPR, ISO 27001

• Built automation across third-party services to improve engineering velocity
• Designed and socialized practices for daily developer tooling
• Built stable developer tools customized to internal use cases

Callisto // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco, CA // 2016 - 2018 Stack: Python, Node.js, Django, Heroku, Travis CI

• Built and upgraded security application logic for the campus product
• Built client-side encryption systems in Python and Node.js
• Paired with cryptographers to prove out novel cryptographic methods

Ruby Together // Open Source Software Engineer // 2016 Stack: Ruby, RubyGems, Bundler, GitHub

Harlot Media // Software Engineer // 2015 - 2016 Stack: JavaScript, PHP, Bash, DigitalOcean

Quirell // Software Engineer // 2014 - 2015 Stack: Python, Flask, Neo4j, Heroku

NASA // Engineering Student Ambassador // 2012 - 2013 Stack: Climate science education

Community & Open Source Leadership

Write/Speak/Code // Seattle Chapter Organizer // 2019 - 2020 Stack: Nonprofit community supporting technologists from marginalized genders

urfave/cli // Maintainer // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Go CLI framework with broad downstream adoption

Also available as a PDF.