Kai Ase Siren

Senior platform engineer building policy-bound AI systems and developer infrastructure.

I'm Kai Ase Siren (preferred name), AKA Lynn Conway (legal name). I build the infrastructure around agents as independent open-source work: bounded execution and egress in umbra, guarded MCP generation in mcp-beaver, context composition in agent-compose, and evaluation in housecast. Underneath that is more than ten years of platform engineering, developer experience, observability, and production operations, which is what keeps an agent layer standing in production rather than in a demo.

The throughline is developer infrastructure, and agents are its newest consumer. That has meant language-ecosystem tooling at Ruby Together, multi-cloud platforms at Textio, government infrastructure at Nava, and agent-facing observability and MCP surfaces at Kapwing. I run a two-site homelab and a public game server, which is where the platform, reliability, and observability work gets tested outside a job.

My career has been mostly individual-contributor work, with a chapter managing a small DevOps team at EnergyHub. I am strongest in ambiguous systems work where architecture, reliability, and developer experience have to meet.

// https://linkedin.com/in/coilysiren // https://forgejo.coilysiren.me/coilysiren // https://github.com/coilysiren // https://coilysiren.me // email: coilysiren@gmail.com // location: East Bay, CA // US Citizen

Current Open Source

• umbra is a least privilege boundary that occludes agent CLIs and outbound requests behind declared policy: argv validation before exec, a scope token per verb, a rotating audit log, and a public exit-code taxonomy. mcp-beaver generates the guarded MCP server from that same policy artifact.
• housecast casts every agent role from one YAML roster and grades them from that same file, so the graded artifact and the shipped artifact are identical. agent-compose composes the persona an agent runs as and renders it into harness surfaces, carrying no credential, no mount, and no command.

Skills

• Agent platforms: MCP, agent orchestration, context composition, bounded execution, evaluation, model routing, agent observability, LLM APIs
• Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript / Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP
• Cloud and compute: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, serverless, EC2, ECS, Batch, Docker, Linux
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Packer, Pulumi
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Sentry
• Security and governance: NIST 800-53, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, least-privilege tooling

Experiences

Kapwing // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco // 2025 - Present Stack: Python, Node.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP, New Relic, MCP, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code

• Build observability for machine consumers, telemetry shaped for agents rather than dashboards
• Ship an agent-facing MCP surface for a production media pipeline
• Design agentic debugging workflows against production telemetry
• Improve Dockerized Python startup performance by roughly 2x

Nava // Principal Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2023 - 2025 Stack: Python, Java, Terraform, AWS, NIST 800-53, New Relic

• Deployed a government website for the US Department of Health and Human Services
• Improved backend applications written in Python and Java
• Remediated security vulnerabilities to maintain NIST 800-53 compliance
• Deployed Metabase for analytics and reporting

Textio // Staff Infrastructure Engineer // Remote // 2022 - 2023 Stack: Python, Go, TypeScript, Datadog, Airflow, AWS, Azure, Azure OpenAI, SOC 2

• Deployed Airflow with a SQLMesh orchestration layer for data-science workflows
• Deployed Azure OpenAI through a multi-cloud BGP VPN to AWS
• Migrated monitoring to a customized Datadog and Fluent Bit system
• Built Python data pipelines for customer reporting systems

EnergyHub // DevOps Engineering Manager // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 - 2022 Stack: Engineering manager and technical lead for a team of 2 to 4

• Hired a DevOps team and shaped a role distinct from product engineering
• Managed security policy and practice for daily work and significant incidents

EnergyHub // Senior DevOps Engineer // Brooklyn, NY // 2021 Stack: Python, Java, Ansible, Terraform, Datadog, MongoDB, AWS, SOC 2

• Stabilized Ansible deployment tooling and brought it to current standards
• Upgraded internal systems to production-grade managed services
• Performed SOC 2 control remediations and built supporting tooling

Bluelink // Senior Backend Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Python, Java, GCP, Kubernetes

• Built Java and Python services on Kubernetes and GCP for partner API data flows
• Shipped data-flow products for Democratic candidates and progressives

Textio // Senior Infrastructure Engineer // Seattle, WA // 2018 - 2020 Stack: Python, Go, Node.js, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, AWS ECS, GDPR, ISO 27001

• Built automation across third-party services to improve engineering velocity
• Designed and socialized practices for daily developer tooling
• Built stable developer tools customized to internal use cases

Callisto // Senior Software Engineer // San Francisco, CA // 2016 - 2018 Stack: Python, Node.js, Django, Heroku, Travis CI

• Built and upgraded security application logic for the campus product
• Built client-side encryption systems in Python and Node.js
• Paired with cryptographers to prove out novel cryptographic methods

Ruby Together // Open Source Software Engineer // 2016 Stack: Ruby, RubyGems, Bundler, GitHub

Harlot Media // Software Engineer // 2015 - 2016 Stack: JavaScript, PHP, Bash, DigitalOcean

Quirell // Software Engineer // 2014 - 2015 Stack: Python, Flask, Neo4j, Heroku

NASA // Engineering Student Ambassador // 2012 - 2013 Stack: Climate science education

Community & Open Source Leadership

Write/Speak/Code // Seattle Chapter Organizer // 2019 - 2020 Stack: Nonprofit community supporting technologists from marginalized genders

urfave/cli // Maintainer // 2020 - 2021 Stack: Go CLI framework with broad downstream adoption

Also available as a PDF.