CJ Ketchum
Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead Manager at Aurora
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCJ Ketchum is a Staff Software Engineer and tech lead manager with 11 years of experience building cloud-native infrastructure and production systems from startup CTO to engineering leadership at Aurora. As Co‑Founder and CTO of Capabuild, he combined hands-on engineering with product leadership, and his open-source contributions to tools like Atlantis and Toil show a focus on Terraform automation, workflow reliability, and secure cluster provisioning. He excels at improving operability—adding clearer status reporting, GitHub API logging, and race-condition fixes—to make complex DevOps flows predictable and debuggable. CJ’s background spans autonomous systems, genomics workflows, and large-scale cloud platforms, giving him a practical cross-domain perspective on distributed systems. Based in San Francisco, he pairs startup grit with programmatic rigor, often surfacing subtle reliability and observability improvements that prevent outages before they occur.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa Cruz
English, Spanish
Github Skills (21)
docker10
python10
dockers10
terraform10
terraformer10
automation10
go10
aws10
golang10
automations10
atlantis10
devops10
github-ci9
mesos9
workflow-engine9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
DataBiosphere/toil
Nov 2016 - May 2017
A scalable, efficient, cross-platform (Linux/macOS) and easy-to-use workflow engine in pure Python.
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:5 releases, 120 commits, 275 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:CJ primarily focused on improving the Toil workflow engine's functionality and stability. Their contributions include bug fixes related to Azure integration and enhancements to log messages for better debugging. The user also worked on the AWS provisioner, implementing security improvements and optimizing the cluster management process. Additionally, the commits demonstrate work on the Mesos batch system, incorporating job name integration for improved UI visibility and handling race conditions.
pythoncommon-workflow-languagemesosawsslurm
runatlantis/atlantis
Mar 2020 - Jun 2020
Terraform Pull Request Automation
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:6 commits, 15 PRs, 19 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:CJ's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the automation and reliability of the Atlantis Terraform pull request automation tool. They implemented features to improve the status reporting during the autoplan process, ensuring accurate feedback when no projects are found or when draft pull requests are handled. Additionally, the user added logging for Github API calls, improving debugging capabilities.
atlantisgolangdevopsgopull-request
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