Don Kjer
Principal Software Engineer at Roblox
Burlingame, California, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorDon Kjer is a Principal Software Engineer and hands-on architect with over 17 years of experience designing and operating large-scale virtual worlds, currently shaping platform engineering at Roblox from Burlingame, CA. He has led architecture and engineering teams at Linden Lab and Wookey Technologies, migrating legacy systems, cutting AWS costs by 34%, and building highly available, modular back-end services for products like Second Life and Sansar. Comfortable moving between coding and leadership, he combines deep systems-level expertise with pragmatic delivery—improving build and deployment pipelines, identifying performance bottlenecks, and mentoring engineers. An active contributor to notable open-source projects, he’s applied embedded/IoT skills to QMK firmware and improved Docker registry components in Moby, showing breadth from firmware to cloud services. Known for translating business needs into scalable technical specifications, he’s passionate about virtual worlds and skilled at driving cross-disciplinary collaboration to reduce time-to-market.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (26)
container10
docker10
c-language10
apidoc10
qmk-firmware10
testing10
firmware10
c1110
dockers10
keyboard10
c1710
go10
api10
sys10
golang10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
moby/moby
Oct 2014 - Jun 2015
The Moby Project - a collaborative project for the container ecosystem to assemble container-based systems
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 4 PRs, 81 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Don contributed to the Moby project, focusing on improvements to the registry and related components. They implemented changes related to repository name validation, deprecation of certain functions, and improvements to registry mirror configuration. Additionally, they made modifications to the `api/client/utils.go` and `registry/config.go` files. These changes also include enhancements to the testing suite, demonstrating a focus on ensuring the reliability of the Docker registry functionality.
containerscollaborative-projectgolangcontainer-ecosystemdocker
qmk/qmk_firmware
Jan 2021 - Aug 2021
Open-source keyboard firmware for Atmel AVR and Arm USB families
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:23 reviews, 8 commits, 10 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Don primarily contributed to the firmware for mechanical keyboards, focusing on adding support for the DURGOD Taurus K320 and K310 keyboard models. Their work involved implementing keymaps, including Windows and Mac layouts, along with features like Windows key lock and media key functionality. They also refactored the Durgod keyboard configuration, standardized layout macros, and implemented wear leveling and increasing simulated EEPROM density for STM32.
rp2040firmwareavratmelkeyboard-support
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.