Kathleen Derusso
Principal Software Engineer at Elastic
New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKathleen Derusso is a Principal Software Engineer based in New York with a six-year formal experience window and a long track record leading search teams across Elastic, Datto, IEEE GlobalSpec, and IHS. She specializes in search relevance and backend API design, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Elasticsearch and Kibana where she implemented Search Application APIs, rule management, and UI fixes for Enterprise Search. Comfortable across Java, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, and Go, she blends deep search engine expertise (Elasticsearch, Solr/Lucene) with practical SaaS delivery and team leadership. Kathleen’s background spans hands-on operations to principal engineering, giving her a rare full-stack perspective on building, deploying, and operating large-scale search systems. Notably, she has driven both backend template and endpoint work in core Elastic projects while also improving developer UX in the Dev Console. She holds computer science degrees and an MBA, pairing technical depth with product and business sensibility.
6 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at University at AlbanyMBA Business, MBA Business at The College of Saint RoseAS Computer Science, AS Computer Science at Schenectady County Community College
English
Github Skills (27)
algorithm10
algorithms10
javascript10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
amazon-elasticsearch10
metasearch10
kibana10
java10
searching10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
api10
web-search10
aws-elasticsearch10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/elasticsearch
Oct 2022 - Oct 2022
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1141 reviews, 5 commits, 264 PRs in 15 days
Contributions summary:Kathleen contributed to the initial development of a Search Application Search API, focusing on implementing search functionality with templates. This involved significant code changes within the `SearchApplication` and `TransportQuerySearchApplicationAction` classes, suggesting a focus on backend logic and API design. Furthermore, the user was involved in the addition of a default template to the Search Application, providing initial search capabilities. The changes involved the addition of API calls for getting, deleting, and listing query rulesets, and managing rule creation.
restfulsearch-engineopensearchelasticsearchjava
elastic/kibana
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
Your window into the Elastic Stack
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:122 reviews, 1 commit, 25 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Kathleen contributed to the Kibana project by fixing bugs related to the Enterprise Search functionality, specifically addressing document search issues and API key permissions. They added new endpoints to the search passthrough API. The user also made updates to the UI, including fixing a copy error on the documents tab and removing a call to action. Additionally, they updated the auto-complete functionality in the Dev Console and reorganized the ML pipeline card for indices pipeline view.
elasticdashboardskibanaobservabilitywindow
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