Ken Haines
Principal Software Engineering Manager - Commerce & Finance Platform
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarKen Haines is a Principal Software Engineering Manager in Seattle with 11 years of professional experience leading large-scale, compliance-sensitive commerce and finance platforms at Microsoft. He combines hands-on distributed systems and cloud-native expertise with people leadership, having driven migrations from legacy runtimes to Kubernetes and modernized monoliths into resilient microservices. Ken has a strong operational focus—championing observability, incident discipline, and real-time trade-offs during high‑risk financial transitions to protect correctness and delivery commitments. His open-source contributions to high-profile projects like Cortex and Grafana Mimir show deep backend and cloud storage knowledge, including Azure Blob and TSDB integrations and availability-zone aware optimizations. He blends strategic partnership experience from roles shaping Azure for gaming and external partners with a pragmatic engineering culture that develops senior technical leaders. Notably, he embeds AI‑readiness into platform roadmaps to ensure future data and security needs scale without compromising trust.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (19)
kubernetes10
back-end-development10
cloud-infrastructure10
microsoft-azure10
azure-blob-storage10
go10
prometheus10
kubernetes-pods10
azure10
cloud-services10
cassandra9
devops9
dynamodb9
amazon-dynamodb9
grpc8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
cortexproject/cortex
Mar 2018 - Apr 2021
A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:4 releases, 12 reviews, 46 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributed to improving the Cortex project's backend infrastructure. They modified the ingester client to make the maximum receive message size configurable and added flags for compression, indicating work related to performance and data handling. The user also worked on the addition of Azure Blob storage support, and Azure TSDB storage engine and fixed issues. Furthermore, they contributed to enhancing HA tracking, availability zone awareness, and incorporating retry options for Cassandra, reflecting experience in cloud infrastructure and database optimization.
golangscalabletenantprometheus-exporterlong-term
grafana/mimir
Jan 2021 - Apr 2021
Grafana Mimir provides horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ken primarily focused on enhancing the Grafana Mimir project's back-end infrastructure. Their contributions included making the IngesterClient configurable, by introducing command-line flag support and config lifecycle adjustments. They also added protections against invalid messages, including validation checks, debug output, and counters for dropped DynamoDB requests. Furthermore, the user integrated support for Microsoft Azure Blob storage for chunk storage and experimental TSDB features.
tenantobservabilitygrafanaprometheusstorage
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