Ken Finnigan
Site Reliability Engineering Manager at Commonhaus Foundation
Pembroke, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKen Finnigan is a Site Reliability Engineering manager with 15+ years building observability-first platforms and distributed Java systems, currently leading SRE efforts at Assured. He has deep hands-on experience driving OpenTelemetry adoption, architecting telemetry pipelines in Kubernetes, and defining SLO/SLA frameworks across large organizations from Workday to Alteryx. A long-time open-source contributor and co-founder of several Java frameworks (Quarkus/Thorntail/SmallRye), he blends product-facing engineering with platform reliability and developer experience improvements. Ken’s background spans both enterprise transformation projects (bank migrations, middleware modernizations) and cloud-native observability products, giving him a rare mix of legacy systems pragmatism and modern ops tooling expertise. He’s published books and spoken at major conferences, and his OpenTelemetry work has measurably reduced developer debugging time by capturing richer payload data. Based in Pembroke, MA, he’s also an amateur genealogist and council member of the Commonhaus Foundation, reflecting interests that bridge technical leadership and community stewardship.
15 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Information Systems, BSc, Information Systems at University NSW
Stackoverflow
835reputation
48kreached
39answers
0questions
Github Skills (50)
unit-testing10
kubernetes10
docker10
messaging10
amqp10
testing10
configuration-management10
rest-services10
kafka10
process-management10
dockers10
java10
webservice10
javas10
restful10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
thorntail/thorntail-examples
May 2015 - Feb 2019
Examples of how to write applications using Swarm.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:192 commits, 109 PRs, 157 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributed to the development of example applications using Swarm, which involves the use of Java and JEE technologies. They implemented examples that integrated JPA with applications, including adding H2 database and persistence configurations. The user also updated existing examples to work with the latest WildFly Swarm versions. Additionally, the user worked on merging various examples, showing proficiency in building and deploying Java EE applications.
swarm
thorntail/thorntail
Aug 2015 - Mar 2019
Source code for the Thorntail project
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:677 commits, 782 PRs, 784 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ken's commits focus on enhancing the Thorntail project. Their contributions include refactoring integration-tests modules to improve organization and adding functionality for test artifact dependencies. They added support for adding web.xml context parameters and added various fraction modules. They've contributed to improved codebase quality and provided a way to utilize the project within a custom main() context.
javathorntailmavenmicroservices
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