Kao Kao
Co-Founder at Coverbase
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKao Kao is a seasoned software leader and founder with nine years of experience building high-throughput, reliable systems and leading product teams. Currently co-founding Coverbase in Boulder to tackle B2B risk, he previously scaled Stripe Issuing—designing its Disputes API and a Golang service that validates cryptograms for over $1B in annual transactions—and led the Issuing Onboarding and Compliance team through 30x net volume growth. A pragmatic backend and DevOps engineer, he contributes to major CNCF and Istio projects (notably keadm for KubeEdge) where he focused on edge deployment tooling, networking fixes, and performance optimizations. His background spans data science at Quora, authoring a widely used interactive SQL book, and military leadership as a tank platoon commander—an unusual combination that informs his disciplined, results-oriented approach.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Carry S19, Carry S19 at Y CombinatorBachelor of Science (BS), Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (BS), Mathematics at University of Chicago
Chinese
Github Skills (19)
service-mesh10
kubernetes10
go10
performance-optimization10
kubernetes-pods10
golang10
debug9
networking9
microservices-application9
build-automation9
edge-computing9
microservices9
system-administration9
docker8
api-management8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
kubeedge/kubeedge
Dec 2020 - Apr 2022
Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Framework (project under CNCF)
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:222 reviews, 37 commits, 48 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Kao primarily contributed to the keadm tool, focusing on edge node configuration and deployment. They implemented features to support modifications to the edgeStream.TunnelServer and addressed issues related to the creation of device and reliable sync CRD paths. The user also made improvements to the service file management and refactored the retryDownload function, showcasing skills in system administration and build automation. Their work also included refactoring retryDownload and fixing an IP lookup error.
golangedge-computingmosquittodevice-managementmqtt
istio/istio
Sep 2021 - Jan 2022
Connect, secure, control, and observe services.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 8 PRs, 18 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Kao primarily focused on improving the Istio project's backend code and optimizing performance. Their contributions include refactoring code to use public constants, cleaning up duplicate error logs, and removing unnecessary checks and memory allocations. They also addressed specific issues related to networking and data processing within the Istio ecosystem, which improve overall efficiency and reliability.
circuit-breakerenforce-policiesistioapi-managementmicroservice
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