Dee Kitchen (London, UK)
+44.7740949212
cv@dee.kitchen
https://dee.kitchen
https://github.com/buro9
Last updated: 2023-12-01

Summary
-------

VP, Engineering managing ~100 engineers. Highly technical, and involved
in technical direction, leader who cares deeply about personal development
of engineers and safe environments for long-term sustainable and valuable
engineering work.

In the last decade technical focus has been on distributed systems, databases,
telemetry, observability, privacy, and security products such as firewalls,
protection against DDoS, traffic filtering, and building products that support
end customers and users.

In the same period management focus has been on mental health, diversity,
and personal development of direct reports.

Experience
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### Grafana Labs, VP, Engineering, June 2020 to present.

Building and managing the teams responsible for Prometheus, Mimir, Cortex,
Loki, Tempo, and Phlare. This is a set of teams whose focus is common;
databases for system telemetry and observability as a SaaS, on-prem, and OSS.

This role is 100% remote.

### Cloudflare, Engineering Manager, November 2014 to June 2020

Technical vision and management for the firewall including the WAF, DDoS,
and customer configured firewall via a Wireshark Display Filter syntax.
Managed the DDoS, Firewall, WAF and UI teams.

### Microcosm, CTO, September 2012 to October 2014

Founder and CTO of a technical startup company focused on building a PaaS
solution for discussion-based communities. Led product, dev, marketing and
sales whilst managing the technical direction and implementation.

### Yell Labs, Global Architect, April 2010 to February 2012

Led a research and development lab to discover new opportunities for
the company and to demonstrate how to build revenue. Hired and managed a
team of ~40, launched several new products including mobile applications
and big data applications. Tech lead for 20 engineers.

### Pcubed, Technical Architect, August 2003 to April 2010 

Technical Architect leading a team of developers to produce a set of
solutions across retail, finance and manufacturing verticals to solve
client specific problems. Managed 6 people, tech lead for the company.

Worked closely (in Seattle) with Microsoft through a DAC (Developer Advisory
Council) position.

### Premium TV, Senior Engineer, May 2001 to August 2003

Senior Engineer delivering a video CMS system for Football and sports
sites in the UK. Produced the first successful subscription video site on
the web, and built all applicable systems for this.

### BT Openworld (British Telecom), Senior Developer, August 2000 to May 2001

Senior Developer with sole responsibility for creating and delivering the
consumer portal and CMS. Core developer for the BTinternet consumer portal.

### Jeepster Records, December 1996 to August 2000

Established their online presence, built a full ecommerce site, won a Brit
Award with Belle & Sebastian. Nominations for Best Music Website from music
press within the UK and globally. Built the stock management, financial
reporting, online shop and mail order business and all code relating to it.

Education
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Master of Science (Merit), Computer Science, 2010 Birkbeck,
    University of London

Project: "An Approach to Reporting Against Geographically Distributed
    Semi-Structured Data"

Professional Groups
-------------------

CITP (Chartered IT Professional) with the BCS (British Computer
    Society)

ACM Member (Association of Computer Machinery)
    Member of ACM SIGACT (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and
        Computation Theory)
    Member of ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems)

Patents
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Patents granted or in application for inventions ranging from: customer
loyalty systems, web security within a CDN, CDNs that dynamically modify
content, web traffic limiting, and web performance optimisation.

* WO2013008017 Secure collection and validation of loyalty points
* US20170118299 Methods and apparatuses for providing a desired portion of
  a data object document
* US9961066 Method and apparatus for limiting traffic rate to an origin
  server
* US10171446 Method and apparatus for limiting traffic rate to an origin
  server
* US10733307 Transparent inspection of responses from origin servers to
  identify protected data

Out-of-Hours
------------

Cyclist. Core developer of Microcosm which hosts over 300 cycling
communities, including https://www.lfgss.com/ and numerous small forums and
community web sites. Total +250k users per month as of September 2016.

https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday Author of the HTML sanitizer for
Go. Which protects against XSS in user generated content.