Kris Zentner
Principal SRE - Office Of The CTO at Microsoft
Woodinville, Washington, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolKris Zentner is a Principal SRE with 11+ years of focused experience building and running large-scale Linux and hybrid cloud infrastructure for Microsoft Research, now serving in the Office of the CTO. He blends deep hands-on expertise in Linux, automation (Ansible, Chef), observability (Sensu, Prometheus, Azure Monitor) and cloud-native tooling with a proven track record of leading teams, mentoring engineers, and shepherding service lifecycles from creation to deprecation. Kris has driven migrations from legacy config management to modern automation, architected GPU and HPC fleets, and built metrics and SLO-driven monitoring for stakeholder decision-making. An active open-source contributor, he improved Ohai’s Azure profiling to surface richer metadata for cloud instances—an example of his attention to operational detail. Based in Woodinville, WA, he pairs pragmatic engineering with empathetic leadership, emphasizing documentation, cost-conscious cloud design, and continuous learning.
11 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
BA Linguistics, BA Linguistics at University of Washington
Spanish, French
Github Skills (9)
azure10
microsoft-azure10
oai10
ruby10
configuration-file9
configurations9
configuration-management9
api8
api-design8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
chef/ohai
Mar 2018 - Mar 2018
Ohai profiles your system and emits JSON
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Kris primarily worked on enhancing the Azure-related functionality within the Ohai project, focusing on gathering and providing system information for Azure environments. They refactored and improved the Azure plugin to handle potential network output variations, ensuring robustness and data integrity. Their contributions included incorporating richer metadata, such as resource group name, availability zone, and subscription details, to provide more comprehensive system profiling. The user also addressed style issues and corrected function calls within the Azure plugin.
configurationconfiguration-managementohaiemitsruby
kriszentner/technotes
Aug 2018 - Feb 2019
Contributions:34 commits, 29 pushes, 1 branch in 6 months
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