Curriculum vitae
Shane Kennedy
Professional summary
Passionate software engineer with 7+ years of experience building high-scale data platforms, backend services, and developer tooling. Currently leading the Data Ingestion and Streaming team at Klarna, where we architect and maintain the Apache Kafka ecosystem that acts as the service-to-service communication channel across the entire organization as well as the ingestion of data from Kafka to data warehouses and lakes that power petabyte-scale business intelligence, machine learning, and exploratory ad-hoc workloads.
My journey spans from full-stack web development at Kognity to optimizing backend services handling thousands of requests per second at Tink, where I achieved 4× throughput improvements through strategic re-architecture, and now at Klarna leading the Data Ingestion and Streaming team platforming Kafka and its ecosystem. I thrive on solving complex technical challenges, continuously learning new technologies, and building tools that make developers' lives easier.
Experience
Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead
Klarna · 2024 – Present
- Team lead on the Data Ingestion and Streaming team responsible for the Apache Kafka ecosystem
- Manage main service-to-service communication platform for all of Klarna
- Build tooling and systems for streaming data to the data platform for analytical workloads
- Technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Avro, AWS, Java, Go
Senior Software Engineer
Tink · 2021 – 2024
- Built credit decisioning API products in Risk team and data ingestion pipelines in Transactions team
- Decoupled and re-architected legacy systems to make transaction ingestion more reliable and scalable
- Increased throughput in transaction ingestion pipeline by up to 4×
- Shipped new credit decisioning products from concept to production service
- Technologies: Java, Elasticsearch, AWS, Apache Kafka, Cassandra, MySQL, Go, Terraform, gRPC, Kubernetes
Software Engineer
Kognity · 2018 – 2021
- Maintained, improved, and implemented new features across the full technology stack
- Led project team that moved deploy process to container-based, reducing deploy times by 50%
- Worked closely with project managers and designers to scope requirements and deliver value
- Responsible for RESTful APIs, CI/CD, UI, Docker images, and more
Education
Bachelor of Applied Science — Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Queen's University · Sep 2013 – May 2018
Technical skills
Core technologies
Apache Kafka, Go, Rust
Programming languages
Go, Rust, TypeScript, Python
Infrastructure & DevOps
AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Postgres, MySQL
Web technologies
Next.js, React
Projects
- varroRust
A search index inspired by Apache Lucene
- npm.elEmacs Lisp
NPM client for emacs
- spotituiRust
A TUI for spotify
- pydepsyncRust
Automatically sync dependencies in your python codebase to your pyproject.toml
- ktuiRust
A kafka TUI to view topics, config and live tail
- libsqlqGo
Libsql backed queues with support for local and turso implementations