Kevin Knapp is a Senior Principal Software Engineer based in Virginia with 22+ years in engineering and 12 years of focused professional experience building secure, high-performance systems for government, military, and commercial customers. He blends hands-on Rust and systems programming—contributing to notable projects like rustup, clap, and eBPF tooling—with architectural leadership in multi-cloud, virtualization, and security-critical solutions. At Brilliant Solutions he led design and implementation of kernel-level networking, distributed intrusion detection, and automated multi-cloud obfuscation, while mentoring teams on secure-by-design principles. Kevin’s background in military special communications and digital forensics informs a pragmatic approach to resilience, operational constraints, and threat-aware engineering. Outside work he’s an avid coder who also enjoys skydiving, reflecting a taste for technical rigor and high-adrenaline challenges.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Maryland Global Campus
A cargo subcommand for displaying when Rust dependencies are out of date
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:7 releases, 1 review, 115 commits in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Kevin's contributions centered around building a command-line tool using Rust, specifically a cargo subcommand for managing and displaying Rust dependency information. Their initial work involved setting up the project and implementing the core functionality, likely including parsing and processing the `Cargo.lock` file to extract dependency versions. The user also refactored the code by breaking it into modular components, improving error handling and adding CI/CD capabilities, demonstrating experience with Rust and project structure. The final commits included a CLI test suite to improve UX.
A full featured, fast Command Line Argument Parser for Rust
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:103 releases, 16 reviews, 1944 commits in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Kevin's commits focus on enhancing the clap-rs/clap project, which is a command-line argument parser for Rust. The contributions involve adding new tests, refactoring existing code, and fixing bugs to improve the robustness and usability of the parser. In particular, they introduced new test cases for stdin characters and positional values, refactored the macros, fixed bugs related to handling values in options and commands, and added support for conditionally required arguments.
argvfull-featuredsubcommandsrustargument-parser
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Kevin Knapp - Senior Principal Software Engineer at Clarity