Chris Kuehl
Staff Software Engineer at Reddit, Inc.
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Kuehl is a Staff Software Engineer based in Berkeley with 14 years of experience building reliable backend systems and developer tooling. Currently at Reddit after a long tenure at Yelp where he moved from engineer to tech lead, he focuses on performance-sensitive dependency resolution, container init systems, and developer workflow automation. His open-source contributions include impactful improvements to widely used projects like Python Poetry, pre-commit, and Yelp’s PaaSTA—optimizing dependency caches, adding Rust CI support, and hardening local-run workflows. He blends backend engineering with DevOps instincts, routinely improving CI/CD, signal handling in containers, and test automation to make systems safer and faster. Known for digging into edge cases and reducing unnecessary work (e.g., eliminating redundant cache clears during backtracking), he brings both pragmatic craftsmanship and systems-level thinking to production problems. A UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he pairs strong academic foundations with hands-on open-source leadership.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
4,147reputation
325kreached
9answers
5questions
java
top-5%
inputstream
top-1%
Github Skills (52)
dependency-management10
git10
kubernetes10
docker10
lib10
unix10
pytest10
package-management10
python10
utf10
testing10
init10
python-poetry10
process-management10
bash10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
Yelp/dumb-init
Jul 2015 - Dec 2022
A minimal init system for Linux containers
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Automation Engineer
Backend Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:21 releases, 1 review, 259 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the core functionality of `dumb-init`, a process supervisor designed for container environments. Their work included implementing signal handling, process group management, and exit status handling. Furthermore, the user added unit tests and implemented the setup and build process for the project, including packaging it as a Python package and setting up a CI/CD pipeline.
unixcontainersseccompinit-systemlinux
Yelp/paasta
Nov 2015 - Jun 2022
An open, distributed platform as a service
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 113 commits, 84 PRs in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on improving the `paasta` platform by modifying the `local-run` command's behavior and the underlying infrastructure. They implemented features such as enabling dry-run functionality and handling edge cases related to local Makefiles. The user also updated various aspects of the PaaSTA tools including firewall updates and dependency management for running containers. Furthermore, the user contributed to improved documentation and code organization within the repository.
mesosdockerplatform-as-a-servicedistributed-systemsmicroservices
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