Karl Skewes
Staff Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKarl Skewes is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building reliable distributed systems, specializing in Go and SRE practices. He has driven large-scale observability and deployment initiatives—most recently at Grafana Labs and previously scaling Salesforce’s Spinnaker installation that served thousands of clusters and ~400k daily pipeline runs. Karl combines pragmatic platform engineering (Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, Spinnaker) with hands-on DevOps work, contributing to prominent open-source projects like prometheus-operator and oauth2-proxy to improve monitoring, ingress and logging. He’s proven at turning legacy setups into immutable, automated platforms that delivered 10x improvements in lead time and MTTR, and he thrives in remote, cross-timezone teams. Uncommonly for an engineer at this level, he blends product-minded stakeholder consultation with deep implementation work—often shipping infra-level changes that directly reduce operational toil. Based on a background that spans startups to enterprise, he prefers roles leveraging Go (and Rust) to solve high-availability, production-facing problems.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Information Systems Computer Science Japanese, Bachelor of Information Systems Computer Science Japanese at Massey University - Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa
Japanese
Github Skills (38)
libvirt10
monitoring10
kubernetes10
docker10
testing10
ingress10
cloud-infrastructure10
grafana10
dockers10
terraform10
cicd10
terraformer10
go10
prometheus10
oauth2-proxy10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets
Jan 2019 - Feb 2022
A Kubernetes controller and tool for one-way encrypted Secrets
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 20 commits, 13 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Karl significantly contributed to the project's build, release, and monitoring infrastructure. They integrated GoReleaser for automated builds, releases, and Docker image creation, simplifying the project's deployment process. Further, they implemented Prometheus metrics for monitoring and alerting on unseal errors and requests, including a PodMonitor for Prometheus Operator integration. They also updated existing Prometheus mixin configurations.
controller1passwordencrypt-secretsencryptedsecrets
dmacvicar/terraform-provider-libvirt
Nov 2020 - Jun 2021
Terraform provider to provision infrastructure with Linux's KVM using libvirt
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 74 commits, 2 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Karl primarily focused on refactoring and porting the existing code, specifically related to cloud-init and coreos-ignition functionality. They updated dependencies and switched from packer to google/uuid for UUID generation, affecting multiple files. Furthermore, the user made changes in volume handling, including a volume copier, and several related refactoring changes within the project. These activities also included fixes for libvirt usage and acceptance testing, reflecting DevOps engineering practices.
vmsproviderkvmlibvirtinfrastructure
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