Kyle O'Connor
Software Engineer
About
I am a results-oriented software engineer with nearly 15 years of experience in startups and R&D companies. I have been recognized for my attention to detail, my ability to unblock team members and provide technical leadership. While I am a generalist, my current strongest technical areas are cloud infrastructure, backend development, and embedded systems. Outside of work, I enjoy playing, watching and attending soccer matches.
Work Experience
Principal Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
Joined startup as employee #20 to build a faster web browser by streaming Chrome from the cloud. Decommissioned in late 2022.
Highlights
- Led the Windows team responsible for porting the macOS browser to Windows, delivering an alpha version to 10 customers in November 2022.
- Developed and implemented hardware decoding/rendering/shaders (DirectX), audio playback (RtAudio/WASAPI), and native UI (Win32 API).
- Shipped a native M1 (arm64) build of the macOS browser, resulting in a significant performance improvement on Apple Silicon devices.
- Took ownership of hardware security keys feature involving cross-platform C++ and client/server Node.js applications in TypeScript.
- Maintained CI/CD in GitHub Actions and implemented automated static code analysis using Infer.
- Provided customer support, participated in interviewing candidates, and mentored new hires.
- Gained expertise in Chromium and Electron development.
Lead Software Engineer
Founding member of a biometric identity management startup targeting physical access control and commercial real estate markets. Created as a spin-off from SRI International with investment from Samsung.
Highlights
- Led a team of 5 engineers and directed all software development efforts, including strategy and decision-making.
- Architected and launched a multi-tenant cloud application on AWS, emphasizing security best practices using IaC (Terraform).
- Designed and implemented an external data synchronization system using PostgreSQL, Debezium, AWS Kinesis, and AWS Lambda.
- Developed, debugged, and maintained frontend and backend web applications for biometric access control solutions (Spring Boot, React, PostgreSQL).
- Automated builds and cloud deployments using GitHub Actions, Packer, and Terraform Cloud, and introduced static analysis tools (Sentry, Infer, FindBugs).
- Designed, developed, and debugged embedded C/C++ code for biometric device hardware, including writing multiple Linux kernel drivers for cameras and sensors.
- Maintained custom Linux kernel and U-boot forks, Yocto BSP toolchain, and automated build system.
- Implemented secure boot and zero-copy video decode and rendering pipeline (OpenGL) on embedded NXP/Freescale i.MX6 platform.
- Managed bare metal servers running VMware ESXi and vSphere, and set up firewall, internal networking, and vSAN to separate storage and compute.
- Gained experience with mobile development on both Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift).
Software Engineer III
A technology research and development firm formerly known as Sarnoff Corporation. As a member of the System Software Design and Development group, I contributed to various projects involving biometric recognition and real-time video processing.
Highlights
- Led a software team in developing a multimodal handheld biometric recognition device, which included a custom Android (AOSP) fork and an Android Java application.
- Designed and developed real-time video processing and georegistration applications for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using C++.
- Implemented and optimized image processing algorithms based on MATLAB in C, achieving a reduction in processing time using SIMD instructions.
- Established the DevOps infrastructure for code review, continuous integration, static analysis, and unit testing using Jenkins.
Projects
- Open Source Contributions: libpopcnt (Fast C/C++ bit population count library), localstack (Local AWS cloud stack), LaunchDarkly (C Client SDK)
- Senior Design Project: Collaborated with the Philadelphia Clean Air Council to design and deploy a portable air quality sensor network (ZigBee). Recognized as 2nd best project in the ECE Department.
Contact
Philadelphia, PA
215-253-8556
Education
-
2005 2010
Drexel University
Bachelor of Science
Computer Engineering
Courses- Graduated with honors (Cum Laude)
- Scholar-Athlete (NCAA Division 1)
- Honors Student
- Minor in Business Administration
- Spanish
Skills
Programming Languages
C/C++
Java
JavaScript/TypeScript
SQL
C#/.NET Core
Python
Rust
DevOps
Terraform
AWS
Docker
GitHub Actions
Jenkins
Sentry
AWS
VPC
EC2
ALB
S3
RDS
DynamoDB
ElastiCache
Kinesis
Lambda
ECS
Fargate
OS
Windows
Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS)
Embedded Linux (Yocto)
MacOS
IDE
Visual Studio Code
IntelliJ IDEA
Visual Studio
Static Analysis
FindBugs
Snyk
Coverity
Infer
Unit Testing
JUnit
Mockito
Jest
Build Tools
Yarn
Gradle
CMake
MSBuild
WiX Toolset
Version Control
Git
GitHub
Subversion
TFS
Publications
"Method and system for seamless biometric system self-enrollment" (US20220253514A1)
"Face biometric recognition with anti-spoofing" (US20230350996A1)
Interests
⚽️ Soccer