Darren Kastelic
Software Engineer at IRONLIGHT Group
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDarren Kastelic is a seasoned software engineer and engineering leader with 12 years of experience building and modernizing large-scale data and search infrastructures. Based in Austin, he has led high-impact migrations and platform redesigns—most notably a zero-downtime ElasticSearch migration saving over $3M annually—and founded a data lake platform at Indeed that scaled for 50% year-over-year growth. He excels at designing reliable distributed systems, streamlining complex pipelines (Kafka, Spark, Presto) and converting legacy architectures into maintainable, performant services. A hands-on mentor and team builder, Darren has grown engineering teams from small cores into robust organizations while preserving operational continuity. He has deep systems-level experience dating back to firmware and low-memory networking work, revealing an unusual breadth from embedded code to modern data platforms. Currently coding in Rust, he blends pragmatic engineering with strategic execution to solve knotty infrastructure problems.
12 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering, Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (14)
time-series10
scale10
scalability10
analytics10
large-scale10
java9
random-access9
aws5
webapp4
uploader3
hacklang2
mach2
perl1
freebsd1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
indeedeng/imhotep-cloudformation
Oct 2014 - Apr 2015
Cloudformation scripts and other helper scripts for spinning up an Imhotep cluster in AWS
Contributions:18 commits in 5 months
aws
indeedeng/iupload
Sep 2014 - Oct 2014
TSV uploader webapp for an Imhotep cluster
Contributions:6 commits in 1 month
clustertsvwebappuploader
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