Cari Dean
Senior Software Engineer at LAIKA Studios
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCari Lynn is a Senior Software Engineer based in Portland, Oregon with six years of experience building backend and platform tooling for cloud-native and real-time systems. Currently on Laika’s Core Software team, she focuses on Python to improve developer experience across the studio while drawing on a strong background in Go for platform and Kubernetes-focused tooling. As a former maintainer of Carvel projects like ytt, she contributed modular YAML templating features and OpenAPI schema integrations that improved data validation and deploy workflows. Her career spans product consulting at Pivotal Labs and roles at VMware and Unity, where she shipped APIs for real-time 3D experiences and production-grade deployment tooling. Comfortable across full-stack ecosystems—from Java/Spring and Kotlin to React—she brings a pragmatic mix of systems thinking and user-focused engineering. Colleagues rely on her ability to translate low-level infrastructure concerns into developer-facing features that make deployments and integrations noticeably smoother.
6 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Clark CollegeBachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at Western Washington UniversitySanta Monica College
Github Skills (13)
configuration-management10
configurations10
go10
templating10
configuration-file10
yaml10
schema9
data-structure9
data-structures9
kubernetes8
cli8
kubernetes-pods8
data-validation8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
carvel-dev/ytt
Apr 2020 - Apr 2022
YAML templating tool that works on YAML structure instead of text
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 84 reviews, 77 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Cari primarily focused on enhancing the YAML templating tool, `ytt`, by implementing features related to library references and data value handling. Their work included refactoring code to utilize library references, specifically by path or alias, to enable modularity. They addressed array merging behavior and optimized schema handling, including the integration of OpenAPI schema, which suggests a focus on data validation.
carvelyamltemplating-toolconfigurationyaml-processor
cari-lynn/ytt-argocd-plugin
Feb 2022 - Feb 2022
Contributions:2 pushes, 1 branch in 14 days
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