Paul Kiernan
Chief Technology Officer at Phaselaw
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Kiernan is a seasoned technology leader and hands-on CTO based in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building high-throughput backend systems and leading engineering teams. Currently CTO at Phaselaw after serving as its founding backend engineer, he previously scaled critical infrastructure at Reddit and led backend development at Chartbeat, where he built high-performance systems like a 500k records/sec C++ KV store and real-time streaming analytics tools. He combines deep systems knowledge—databases, distributed replication, streaming—and pragmatic product thinking to turn prototypes into production services. Paul has a history of mentoring and managing multi-team engineering organizations while keeping a developer-first mindset. His technical roots in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell show through in low-level system design and performance optimization. Colleagues would note his knack for turning research prototypes into board-level presentations and operational products.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Xavier High SchoolBachelor of Science Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University
English
Github Skills (68)
solr9
virus9
backend9
lucene9
stream8
ksqldb8
terraform-module8
terraform8
oauth8
aws8
elastic8
java8
kafka-connect8
reddit7
wireguard7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
paulkiernan/taqueria-bonjour
Dec 2020 - Sep 2021
It's a radical new concept in food
Contributions:20 PRs, 118 pushes, 21 branches in 8 months
foodradical
paulkiernan/paulynomial-uptime
Jul 2021 - Apr 2025
Personal Project Uptime
Contributions:1 PR, 5597 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 9 months
uptime-monitorjavascriptnodejsuptimestatus-page
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