Summary
Derek K is a software engineer based in Chicago with 11 years of experience blending backend systems work in Golang, Java, and Python with cloud-native tooling on AWS and containerization via Docker. He has shipped production services at Coalition and EnergyHub, working with PostgreSQL/MySQL, gRPC/Protobuf, Temporal, and observability stacks like Datadog and Sentry. His background in materials engineering gives him a data-driven, experimental approach to product development—prototyping, measuring success with tests and metrics, and iterating based on stakeholder feedback. Comfortable across MacOS and Linux, he pairs systems-level thinking with front-end experience in React and JS, and has practical DevOps exposure including Terraform and Ansible. Outside work he’s a committed polyglot, actively learning languages (Russian and French among seven studied) which underscores a curiosity that fuels rapid learning across new stacks.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Chinese, German, Russian