Jan Kisel
Staff Engineer at Uber
Skanderborg, Central Denmark Region
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJan Kisel is a Staff Engineer with 14 years of experience building and operating large-scale, reliable infrastructure and distributed systems from search engines to deployment platforms. Based in Denmark, he currently leads the Cadence team at Uber, driving scalability, automation, and on-call integrations for a widely used orchestration engine and collaborating closely with U.S. counterparts. He previously led deployment and compute teams at Uber, helping a deployment platform scale sevenfold and adopt safe rollouts, auto-scaling, and robust alerting. Earlier in his career he managed core search-infrastructure teams at Mail.ru, combining hands-on C/C++ backend development, Hadoop-based crawling/indexing, and performance-driven architecture. A pragmatic engineer-manager, Jan still contributes code and tests—most notably fixes and refactors to the open-source Cadence workflow project in Go—bringing deep systems thinking to both operational excellence and developer-facing tooling. His blend of low-level performance tuning and large-team leadership makes him effective at turning brittle, manual operations into automated, production-grade services.
14 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree IT Programming, Master's degree IT Programming at Vyatka state university
Github Skills (11)
cadence10
argo-workflows10
distributed-systems10
workflow-engine10
workflow-automation10
go10
orchestration10
testing9
cli8
command-line-interface8
command-line8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
cadence-workflow/cadence
May 2023 - Mar 2025
Cadence is a distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine to execute asynchronous long-running business logic in a scalable and resilient way.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:143 reviews, 82 PRs, 39 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Jan primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the Cadence workflow orchestration engine, focusing on the Go programming language. Their work involved resolving panics related to workflow parsing, particularly concerning timeouts. They also enhanced the codebase through refactoring and improved test coverage, including changes to command-line interface (CLI) tools related to search attributes. Further contributions involved addressing flakiness in matching tests and improving unit test coverage.
cadenceresilientorchestration-engineservice-buslogic
dkrotx/dux
Aug 2015 - Jan 2019
Contributions:4 commits, 2 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 5 months
unixlinuxreplacement
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