Kate Heddleston
Software Engineer at Light
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKate Heddleston is a software engineer and former founder with 13 years of experience building and scaling product and infrastructure teams across startups and enterprises. She has led engineering at Samsara—growing a team from 6 to 25 and shipping cloud ingestion systems that supported rapid revenue expansion—and has hands-on experience across Python, Go, React/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, and AWS. Comfortable toggling between individual contributor work and people leadership, she’s launched products, instituted leveling/promotion processes, and retooled analytics and experimentation frameworks. As a YC founder (Opsolutely S16) she built an MVP, raised seed funding, and later returned to coding and LLM experimentation—working on fine-tuning, PDF parsing, vector DBs, and prompt/agent workflows. Based in Austin, she combines pragmatic engineering with a designer’s attention to usability and onboarding, and often writes about her work at kateheddleston.com. An outspoken advocate for inclusive teams, she pairs entrepreneurial grit with deep technical breadth.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Y CombinatorHigh School, High School at Granite Bay High SchoolM.S. Computer Science, M.S. Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (7)
janky9
python5
aws5
django5
application-server5
nextjs4
music3
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
heddle317/onboarding
Feb 2014 - Mar 2014
Contributions:11 commits in 1 month
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