About

Ken Ashcraft is a highly accomplished Cross-functional Software Engineer with over 18 years of experience in the field. He is currently working at Netflix, where he leads large, cross-functional technology projects that involve devices like TVs, phones, etc., and servers. Ken is also involved in research on developer productivity, including build, test, and operate. Ken has a unique ability to see the big picture while also going deep on the technology when required. He is an expert in identifying opportunities for engineering organizations and rallying people around solutions. Ken has conducted extensive developer experience research, which he uses to present solutions that help organizations achieve their goals. Before joining Netflix, Ken worked at Calico Labs as the Head of Data Platform, where he led a software engineering team to create and maintain a platform that derived insights from biological data. He worked closely with computational biologists, machine learning experts, and scientists to build a data lake that organized data from genomics, mass spectrometry, microscopy, and physiology data from organisms ranging from yeast to humans. Ken's past experience also includes working at Google, where he held various positions, including Senior Staff Software Engineer, Co-founder, and Tech Lead. He worked on several projects, including Vanadium, Google Cloud SQL, Bigtable, Google App Engine, and Borg Cluster Manager. Ken's contributions to these projects include improving throughput on multicore machines, designing and implementing low-latency, cross-datacenter replication, and overhauling the Bigtable server release process. Ken holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an expert in several technologies, including Software Engineering, Research Science, SQL, ML, MySQL, and NoSQL.