Summary
Derek Kiernan is a Staff Software Engineer based in Naas, Ireland, with roughly eight years of recent experience and a multi-decade career in embedded and FPGA-accelerated networking technologies. He has driven embedded software and customization efforts for FPGA-accelerated vSwitch solutions and spent long tenures at Xilinx before joining AMD, bringing deep hardware-software integration expertise. Pragmatic and systems-focused, Derek excels at turning complex FPGA and embedded requirements into deployable, performant software. Though his public GitHub footprint is minimal, his career path signals strong domain knowledge in programmable logic, low-level drivers, and high-performance networking stacks. He pairs hands-on engineering with institutional memory from legacy and modern silicon platforms, making him effective at bridging product, firmware, and system software teams.
8 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Athlone Institute of Technology
Institute of Technology, Carlow
University Limerick, Ireland