Kalen Petersen
Software Engineer at Omni
Olympia, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKalen Petersen is a seasoned software engineer with 11 years of experience building and improving systems from low-level distributed filesystems to large-scale SaaS platforms, currently working at Omni after a senior leadership stint at Google and Looker. He combines hands-on engineering with team mentorship and has driven measurable operational wins—like a 10x cache latency improvement and a >50% fleetwide database usage reduction—through data-driven optimizations. Kalen has deep backend expertise across languages and architectures, contributing to open-source SDK tooling by refactoring Kotlin codegen to make client overrides simpler and improve code quality. Comfortable both maintaining legacy systems and designing microservice platforms, he favors clear, teachable designs that balance customer value and internal maintainability. Based in Olympia, WA, he brings an engineer’s pragmatism and a teacher’s clarity to complex technical problems.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Engineering Physics, BS Computer Engineering Physics at University of WashingtonN/A Physics Computer Science, N/A Physics Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
English
Github Skills (10)
kotlin10
code-generation10
api10
sdk10
apidoc10
openapi-documentation9
api-specification9
openapi9
code-generator9
open-api-v39
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
looker-open-source/sdk-codegen
Aug 2020 - Nov 2020
One SDK to rule them all, and in the codegen bind them
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 15 commits, 12 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Kalen focused on modifying the Kotlin SDK code generation for the Looker API. Their work primarily involved refactoring and enhancing the `ApiSettings` class to accept a `Map` instead of `Ini` text, enabling simpler behavior overrides for clients. Additionally, they enabled ktlint formatting and moved comments into the header for method parameters, contributing to code quality and maintainability. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving the SDK's flexibility and adherence to coding standards.
code-generationpythonlooker-sdkopenapi-specificationswift5
kalenp/gallery2smugmug
May 2016 - May 2016
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 9 days
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