Jacob Kiefer
Technical Lead at Palantir Technologies
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Kiefer is a Technical Lead with 11 years of experience building high-performance, reliable distributed systems and cloud-native tooling from Cornell to Palantir. He has led engineering teams and shipped scalable security-focused services for Palantir’s CVE risk management, while earlier at Google he re-architected core RPC and gRPC Java components that power widely used services like Gmail and Docs. A prolific Spinnaker contributor, he’s implemented GCP and Kubernetes load balancer support, CLI features, and pipeline templating across multiple repos, blending backend, frontend, and DevOps expertise. Jacob excels at turning ambiguous, high-priority problems into decomposed technical plans and mentoring junior engineers into independent contributors. He pairs low-level systems skill (Linux networking, JNI, UDS) with practical automation and CI/CD work, and has a knack for improving cold-start and resolution performance in large fleets. Based in New York, he combines academic rigor from Cornell with deep production experience delivering secure, auditable platforms.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Masters of Engineering Computer Science, Masters of Engineering Computer Science at Cornell University
Github Skills (73)
google-cloud-platform10
bash10
gcp10
javas10
automation10
google-cloud10
rest-api10
orchestration10
backend10
javascript10
continuous-delivery10
uid10
api10
front-end-development10
kubernetes-pods10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
spinnaker/spin
Mar 2018 - Oct 2019
Spinnaker CLI
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 108 commits, 184 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Jacob focused on implementing and enhancing features related to the Spinnaker CLI. Their contributions involved adding new functionalities, such as the ability to save and delete pipelines, and integrating these features with the Gate API. They also worked on improving the CLI's user interface by standardizing output, colorizing it, and incorporating OAuth2 authentication for enhanced security. Furthermore, they refactored and restructured commands to improve organization and maintainability, along with adding functionality for templated pipelines.
cli
spinnaker/spinnaker
Apr 2016 - May 2019
Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 204 commits, 364 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jacob's commits primarily focused on backend and deployment related tasks within the Spinnaker project. Their work involved modifying installation scripts to handle Cassandra configuration, including fixing variable spelling errors and adjusting the installation flow. Additionally, they contributed to the configuration of the codelab, modifying various configuration files for Jenkins and other components. Finally, they updated and refactored deployment scripts and test cases for the Google Load Balancer, and managed the lifecycle of components.
continuous-deliverycontinuous-deploymentspinnaker
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