Wilken Rivera
Senior Engineering Manager at Defense Unicorns
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilken Rivera is a Senior Engineering Manager with 11 years of software and cloud engineering experience, currently leading teams at Defense Unicorns after a multi-year tenure at HashiCorp. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps expertise—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like HashiCorp Packer and the exercism CLI—with leadership in delivery and infrastructure across media, finance, and defense domains. Wilken’s work includes pragmatic improvements such as environment variable handling in provisioners and robust upgrade/version tooling, showing attention to both developer experience and cross-platform reliability. A former VP-level cloud engineer and longtime contributor to tooling and testing, he brings a systems-minded approach to building repeatable, auditable release processes. Colleagues describe him as someone who credits mentors and community support for his growth and pays that forward through mentorship and well-tested engineering practices.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at The City College of New York
Github Skills (21)
scripting10
testing10
versioninfo10
command-line-interface10
configuration-management10
software-update10
go-testing10
script10
packer10
go10
command-line10
sh10
versioning10
shell10
cicd9
Programming languages (34)
Github contributions (5)
hashicorp/packer
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:4 releases, 1144 reviews, 629 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Wilken contributed to the development of the shell provisioner, adding support for environment variable formatting. They implemented new features like `env_var_format` and incorporated the `use_env_var_file` option, modifying both the provisioner's configuration structure and the tests to accommodate these changes. Their work extended to refactoring the code for the shell provisioner, improving the handling of environment variables, and testing different scenarios with varying parameters.
vagrantplatformslinuxpackerdocker
exercism/cli
Aug 2017 - Nov 2018
A Go based command line tool for exercism.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:2 releases, 21 reviews, 23 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Wilken contributed significantly to the exercism/cli project by implementing the "version" and "upgrade" commands, crucial for software updates and version management. The user also improved the test suite, adding and refactoring tests for existing functionality and contributing to a more robust testing framework. Furthermore, they streamlined the codebase by replacing direct references to `os.Stdout` with the `cmd.Out` writer and addressed Windows-specific upgrade issues.
golangcommand-line-toolcliexercismcommand-based
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