Kurt Harriger
Principal Engineer (Independent) at Independent Research & Prototyping
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKurt Harriger is a principal-level distributed systems engineer with 15 years' experience building cloud-native platforms, high-throughput event pipelines, and production-grade observability for startups and enterprises. He has architected AWS-native, Kubernetes-driven backends that process tens of millions of events a day and helped evolve monoliths into multi-tenant service platforms while balancing performance, reliability, and operational clarity. At Atlassian and Rally he delivered measurable product and reliability gains—shipping analytics features that lifted engagement and running Kafka/Spark pipelines handling terabytes of telemetry daily. He’s equally comfortable in JVM and Node/TypeScript ecosystems and contributes pragmatic infrastructure work such as extending a well-known Clojure AWS client to support ECS. Based in Denver, Kurt combines hands-on prototyping and product instincts with principal-level mentorship, and he has a track record of cutting cloud spend and automating repeatable, auditable deployments. Not obvious from titles: he often embeds with teams via pair programming to quickly surface domain misunderstandings and deliver durable fixes.
15 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Associate's degree, Computer Network Information Systems, Associate's degree, Computer Network Information Systems at Westwood College - Denver NorthMathematics and Statistics, Mathematics and Statistics at Metropolitan State University of Denver
Stackoverflow
2,517reputation
196kreached
13answers
5questions
mocking
top-5%
jasmine
top-5%
Github Skills (17)
clojure-cli10
testing10
aws-sdk10
clojure10
aws10
aws-ecs10
mocking9
jasmine9
osgi6
emacs6
git-svn6
apache-felix6
git6
ios6
obr6
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
mcohen01/amazonica
Apr 2015 - Apr 2015
A comprehensive Clojure client for the entire Amazon AWS api.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 9 comments in 2 days
Contributions summary:Kurt primarily contributed to the `amazonica` Clojure client for AWS. Their work included updating the AWS SDK version, which required adjustments to existing tests due to conflicts. The user added support for ECS (Elastic Container Service), incorporating new functionalities and associated testing, including adding a working example and documentation. Further commits involved refactoring the code by removing a deprecated method, and version bumping the project.
apiaws-apiamazonamazon-awsaws
kurtharriger/elm-battleship
Nov 2015 - Apr 2016
Contributions:45 commits, 22 pushes, 3 branches in 4 months
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