Kit Patella
Staff Software Engineer at Defense Unicorns
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarKit Patella is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years building high-performance distributed systems and data infrastructure, currently contributing to open-source tooling at Defense Unicorns. At HashiCorp they led technical efforts on privacy-centered data projects like hcdiag and Census, translating sensitive customer needs into safe, auditable developer tooling. Kit combines backend systems work—metrics, ACLs, and consistency testing—with DevOps and full-stack experience, evidenced by contributions to high-profile projects such as Consul and Jepsen and enhancements to HashiCorp's go-metrics Prometheus integration. Known for pragmatic debugging and test-infrastructure improvements, they blend deep systems reasoning with practical developer ergonomics to make distributed systems more observable and trustworthy. Based in Seattle, they bring a mix of hands-on engineering, open-source stewardship, and a knack for surfacing user privacy needs in infrastructure design.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (26)
docker10
clojure-cli10
testing10
acl10
bash10
user-interface10
system-design10
dockers10
security10
clojure10
bash-shell10
consul10
script10
go10
prometheus10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
jepsen-io/jepsen
Oct 2017 - Jan 2020
A framework for distributed systems verification, with fault injection
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:143 commits, 59 PRs, 65 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Kit primarily contributed to the infrastructure and testing aspects of the Jepsen framework. They made changes to the Docker setup, enabling random port binding and adding a development configuration with a mounted JEPSEN_ROOT directory. Furthermore, the user clarified the behavior of command-line flags, and incorporated changes related to improving the client protocol. The user also worked on adding and improving the performance of test-related components.
injectionfaultdistributed-systemsverificationfault-injection
hashicorp/consul
Dec 2019 - Jan 2021
Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 92 commits, 59 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Kit contributed to the Consul project by adding and modifying code related to Access Control Lists (ACLs) and token management within the agent. Their work involved integrating accessor IDs for tokens in debugging traces, enhancing ACL debugging, and incorporating review feedback. They made changes to the agent's local state, intention endpoint, and configuration, demonstrating a focus on security and access control aspects of the Consul server.
api-gatewayecsgolangcenterdistributed
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