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  "meta": {
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    "version": "1.0.0",
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  "basics": {
    "name": "Karl Cassel",
    "label": "Backend & Infrastructure Engineer · SRE",
    "email": "hello@heykarl.dev",
    "url": "https://heykarl.dev",
    "summary": "Engineer with 7+ years building internet-scale backend systems and distributed infrastructure for high-throughput, low-latency applications. Expert in architecting production-ready services from requirements through global deployment, with deep experience in Go, Python, and cloud-native architectures on AWS and GCP. Proven technical leader driving cross-team initiatives, mentoring engineering teams, and delivering reliable backend systems processing billions of requests daily. Strong collaboration across engineering, product, design, and research teams to translate complex requirements into scalable solutions.",
    "location": { "city": "San Francisco", "region": "CA", "countryCode": "US" },
    "profiles": [
      { "network": "GitHub", "username": "kcassel", "url": "https://github.com/kcassel" },
      { "network": "LinkedIn", "username": "karl-philippe-cassel", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-philippe-cassel-248b018a/" }
    ]
  },
  "work": [
    {
      "name": "Unity",
      "position": "Senior Software Engineer",
      "location": "San Francisco, CA",
      "startDate": "2025-06",
      "endDate": "",
      "highlights": [
        "Architected large-scale backend data pipelines processing billions of daily events using Kafka, BigQuery, and event-driven architectures, supporting ML training and real-time analytics",
        "Built high-throughput, low-latency backend services in Go and Python handling sub-second response times at internet scale with 99.9%+ availability",
        "Designed Kafka monitoring infrastructure including custom Grafana dashboards for tiered storage cache metrics, performance monitoring, and automated alerting",
        "Developed CI/CD automation tooling using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, reducing deployment time by 40% while maintaining zero-downtime deployments",
        "Built MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers on Temporal durable execution to automate infrastructure documentation across the Ads organization, integrating LLMs to parse, classify, and summarize change updates from KCL/Jsonnet infrastructure repositories",
        "Helped scale production PostgreSQL databases supporting high-throughput backend services"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Salesforce",
      "position": "Senior Software Engineer",
      "location": "San Francisco, CA",
      "startDate": "2021-12",
      "endDate": "2025-04",
      "highlights": [
        "Led cross-functional infrastructure standardization initiative, architecting unified Terraform CI/CD pipelines across 5+ engineering teams — improving developer velocity and deployment consistency",
        "Developed and maintained production backend services in Go: RESTful APIs, microservices, and distributed system components for MuleSoft's platform infrastructure",
        "Designed backend infrastructure for database and storage systems, achieving 90% reduction in database-related incidents via automated monitoring and failover",
        "Established infrastructure quality gates, security controls, and governance frameworks — reducing deployment errors by 30% and ensuring enterprise security compliance",
        "Coordinated complex multi-environment Kubernetes deployments across commercial and government cloud infrastructure, collaborating with compliance teams on regulatory requirements"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "JUUL Labs",
      "position": "Cloud Engineer",
      "location": "San Francisco, CA",
      "startDate": "2018-07",
      "endDate": "2021-08",
      "highlights": [
        "Built identity and access integrations between Workday and internal systems, syncing user identities and single sign-on (SSO) so employee records drove downstream account provisioning across IT services",
        "Automated access-request routing so team approvals surface directly in Slack the moment access is requested, eliminating manually created IT access tickets",
        "Designed onboarding/offboarding automation off Workday HR events, provisioning accounts on hire and deprovisioning on exit to close security gaps from stale accounts",
        "Synced employee and org data from Workday into internal tools, maintaining a reliable source of truth for access, reporting, and downstream automation"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    {
      "institution": "University of California, Santa Cruz",
      "studyType": "Bachelor of Arts",
      "area": "Computer Science",
      "endDate": "2017-06"
    }
  ],
  "certificates": [
    { "name": "AWS Solutions Architect – Associate", "issuer": "Amazon Web Services" },
    { "name": "AWS Security – Specialty", "issuer": "Amazon Web Services" }
  ],
  "skills": [
    { "name": "Languages", "keywords": ["Go", "Python", "Java", "KCL/Jsonnet"] },
    { "name": "AI / LLM", "keywords": ["LLM integrations & automation", "Agentic workflows", "MCP servers", "Temporal durable execution", "RAG", "Vector search", "Structured extraction"] },
    { "name": "Cloud", "keywords": ["AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch)", "GCP (GKE, BigQuery, Cloud Functions)", "Azure"] },
    { "name": "Infrastructure", "keywords": ["Terraform", "Ansible", "CloudFormation", "Infrastructure-as-code"] },
    { "name": "Containers & Orchestration", "keywords": ["Kubernetes", "Docker", "Helm", "ArgoCD", "Service mesh"] },
    { "name": "Streaming & Data", "keywords": ["Kafka (tiered storage, monitoring, perf tuning)", "Apache Flink", "BigQuery", "Real-time analytics"] },
    { "name": "Databases", "keywords": ["PostgreSQL", "BigQuery", "DynamoDB", "RDS", "SQL"] },
    { "name": "Observability & CI/CD", "keywords": ["Grafana", "Prometheus", "DataDog", "Distributed tracing", "GitHub Actions", "Jenkins", "GitLab CI"] }
  ]
}