Ken Liu
Senior Director, Engineering at Cockroach Labs
Madison, New Jersey, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKen Liu is a senior engineering leader with a decade-plus track record of building high-performing teams and developer-facing platforms across startups and scaling companies. As Senior Director of Engineering at Cockroach Labs he founded the Engineering Productivity org and previously stood up Security & Compliance functions, driving SOC 2 Type 2 readiness while overseeing CI/CD, release engineering, and AI-assisted developer tooling. He has scaled organizations from single-digit teams to 60+ engineers, led cloud migrations and platform rewrites, and repeatedly delivered reliability and performance improvements (including a 60x throughput gain earlier in his career). Technically grounded in Ruby on Rails, Java, AWS, Postgres and TDD, Ken blends hands-on contributions (including documentation improvements for the widely used cockroachdb/docs) with strategic ops and hiring. He’s as comfortable in technical due diligence for fundraising rounds as he is coaching engineering managers and shipping developer tools that keep teams moving fast. Based in Madison, NJ, he combines pragmatic engineering leadership with a strong security and compliance sensibility that’s often built quietly behind the scenes.
6 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, BS, Computer Engineering, Computer Science at Virginia Tech
Github Skills (4)
activerecord10
documentation10
ruby10
cockroachdb9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/docs
Jul 2019 - Oct 2022
CockroachDB user documentation
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:2 reviews, 18 commits, 3 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ken's contributions primarily focus on refining and improving the documentation for CockroachDB. They added comments within code samples to enhance clarity, corrected minor syntax issues impacting code highlighting, and made updates to examples demonstrating ActiveRecord adapter usage. Furthermore, the user added detailed comments in transaction code samples, improving the overall quality of the provided documentation. In addition to that the user reverted a change.
user-documentationcockroachdbdatabasearangodb
kenliu/peer-acks-v2
Nov 2021 - Sep 2022
Contributions:3 pushes, 1 branch in 9 months
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