Kevin Mcdermott
Principal Software Engineer at SUSE
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarKevin Mcdermott is a Principal Software Engineer in Glasgow with 18 years of experience building cloud-native and GitOps-focused tooling. He has led teams and hands-on engineering across OpenShift, ArgoCD, and Kubernetes operators, and most recently drives platform work at SUSE after a senior engineering stint at Weaveworks. Kevin is a prolific backend engineer in Go with meaningful open-source contributions to projects like Rancher, ArgoCD operator, Weave GitOps and the classic Heroku logplex, demonstrating deep expertise in HTTP, authentication/secret handling, and operator patterns. He balances architecture and mentorship—shifting from individual contributor work to designing systems and enabling junior engineers to deliver production-ready CI/CD and bootstrapping solutions. A practical troubleshooter with long-running on-call experience at Heroku, he brings operational rigor to developer workflows. Notably, his contributions include nuanced improvements to caching, secret naming consistency, and operator sync behavior that reduce friction for large-scale deployments.
17 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (39)
git10
api-rest10
kubernetes10
docker10
erlang10
redis10
api-design10
restful-api10
testing10
secret-management10
authentication10
user-authentication10
rancher10
dockers10
go10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
rancher/rancher
Sep 2016 - Apr 2025
Complete container management platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:212 reviews, 94 PRs, 39 pushes in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Kevin's commits primarily focus on improving the Rancher container management platform by addressing issues related to secret management and authentication providers. They fixed a bug in the name generation of password secrets, ensuring correct casing. Furthermore, the user refactored secret naming and simplified the secret name generation process across multiple authentication providers, leading to a more consistent and maintainable codebase. The user also made improvements to Azure AD integration.
containersorchestrationdockerrancherkubernetes
heroku/logplex
Jan 2011 - Aug 2017
[DEPRECATED] Heroku log router
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on modifying the Erlang code related to the Heroku log router. Their commits involved refactoring the code, including updates to syslog acceptor, and modifications to the redis helper and queue. The user also updated the configuration settings of the realtime application in relation to using Redis. Additionally, they addressed issues with rate limiting and improved the use of a dedicated connection to Redis.
herokurouter
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