Michael Stahnke
Vice President Of Engineering at Kit
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Stahnke is an engineering executive with nearly two decades of experience scaling teams from startup-sized groups to 250+ engineers across nine countries, and a track record of treating engineering as a core business function. He has run $60M+ engineering budgets, driven gross margin improvements (58% to 68% on $45M+ spend), and partnered with CFOs on unit economics while building cross-functional orgs that sustain hypergrowth. An early adopter and practitioner of AI-driven delivery, he designed agentic systems that produced 3–5x velocity gains by rethinking delivery end-to-end rather than bolting on tooling. He co-authored multiple State of DevOps Reports, speaks frequently on AI and platform engineering ROI, and has hands-on DevOps credentials from contributions to widely used Puppet projects around release engineering, packaging, and secure deployment. Based in Madison, WI, he combines operational rigor, leader development, and product instinct, and is open to senior roles where AI and deep operational experience intersect.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Ball State University
Github Skills (21)
git10
puppeteer10
puppet10
packaging10
configuration-management10
cicd10
ruby10
release-management10
build-automation10
versioning10
devops10
redhat9
debian9
automation9
automations9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
sodabrew/puppet-dashboard
May 2011 - Mar 2013
The Puppet Dashboard is a web interface providing node classification and reporting features for Puppet, an open source system configuration management tool
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:79 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the build and deployment processes for the Puppet Dashboard project. They removed dependencies, specifically MaRuKu, and updated the application to utilize git-describe for versioning. They also refactored the packaging to allow for nightly builds, integrating erb templates for version substitution. Furthermore, they updated the project's licensing to Apache-2.0.
system-configurationweb-interfacereportingpuppetconfiguration-management
puppetlabs/puppetdb
Apr 2012 - Nov 2015
Centralized Puppet Storage
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:34 commits, 2 PRs, 1 push in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the packaging and deployment aspects of the PuppetDB project. Their contributions involved modifying init scripts for Debian and Red Hat systems, updating packaging configurations, and integrating an SSL setup automation script. This work streamlined the build process, improved the package structure, and enhanced the security of PuppetDB deployments.
puppetdbpuppetstoragecentralizedclojure
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