Jacob Christen
Senior Software Engineer at Akamai Technologies
Chandler, Arizona, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Christen is a Senior Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native infrastructure, currently at Akamai after leadership roles at Rancher and SUSE. He is a practitioner of lightweight Kubernetes and related tooling—contributing to high-profile projects like k3s, RKE2, and k3os—where his focus spans build/deploy pipelines, SELinux integration, and automated upgrade tooling. Comfortable both as an individual contributor and engineering leader, he has driven product engineering, CI/CD, and install/build-system refactors that improved reproducibility and multi-arch support. Jacob combines systems-level rigor (OS/init scripts, container runtimes) with pragmatic DevOps automation to make complex platforms simple for users. Based in Chandler, AZ, he brings a physicist’s analytical bent to enable programmability of the physical world, and even surfaces interesting corner fixes like discovering CVE-2021-43816 during release validation.
11 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Physics, B.S. Physics at Southern Oregon University
Stackoverflow
108reputation
9kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (26)
kubernetes10
docker10
scripting10
configuration-management10
rancher10
dockers10
cicd10
runc10
automation10
selinux10
script10
containerd10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
sh10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
rancher/system-upgrade-controller
Jan 2020 - May 2022
In your Kubernetes, upgrading your nodes
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:36 releases, 39 reviews, 88 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Jacob focused on improving the build and deployment process by adding multi-architecture support using `docker buildx`. They introduced features for secret management and plan execution within the Kubernetes environment, enhancing node upgrades. Additionally, the user addressed job lifecycle management with the implementation of `ttlSecondsAfterFinished` for jobs, including adjustments to the job name and handling of the node label. The user also refactored the job handling code and enhanced the plan node selection logic.
kubernetescustom-resource-definitioncrd-controllerupgrades
rancher/k3os
Sep 2019 - Nov 2021
Purpose-built OS for Kubernetes, fully managed by Kubernetes.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:68 releases, 17 reviews, 283 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on build and deployment infrastructure and configuration management. Their contributions include modifying the Dockerfile, and updating build scripts. They also worked on system-level configurations, including modifying init scripts and system configuration files. Their work directly contributes to the automated build, packaging, and deployment processes of the k3os project.
kubernetes
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