# Kevin Stewart (@kstewart.me) Profile: https://sifa.id/p/kstewart.me Headline: SVP Engineering, Splice Location: Greater Seattle Area ## About My focus is on building cross-functional and inclusive product teams for startups and enterprises. I have experience building and leading fully distributed teams that have successfully delivered consumer and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) applications throughout my career. My goal is to enable people to do their best work while delivering successful results for the organization. ## Career - **SVP Engineering at Splice** (Mar 2023 - Present) Restructured engineering organization in order to reduce friction and significantly increase shipping velocity. Recruited strong technical leadership for the new teams to help grow our engineering talent. Led product development for the flagship Splice Sounds portfolio: \* splice.com \* Splice Desktop \* Splice Mobile \* Splice x Fender Studio Pro integration \* Splice x Avid Pro Tools integration \* Splice x Ableton Live integration \* Splice Sounds plugin \* Splice MCP Server Led technical due diligence and engineering team integration for the Spitfire Audio acquisition which accelerated the creation and launch of the Splice INSTRUMENT product. Led technical due diligence and engineering team integration for the Kits.ai acquisition to accelerate the creation of Splice’s next generation music creation product. - **VP Engineering at Harvest** (Apr 2020 - Feb 2023) I led Product and Platform Engineering and focused on defining our engineering culture. This involved, but was not limited to, increasing our overall development velocity, hiring engineers and engineering managers across all functions and introducing value-added technologies into our stack such as GraphQL and React Native. We implemented processes that have helped reduce overall technical debt as well as lowered the support burden by making improvements to the core product. - **VP Engineering, Platform at Fastly** (Jul 2018 - Jul 2019) As VP of Platform Engineering, I led Data Engineering, Developer Productivity and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). - **VP Engineering at Heptio** (Feb 2017 - May 2018) My primary responsibilities were to grow the engineering organization, establish our software development practices, ship quality products and maintain a healthy diverse and inclusive culture. I grew the team from six to approximately 30 people, including systems engineers, site reliability engineers, frontend engineers, product designers, technical writers, engineering managers and directors. Lead the teams building several open source projects that filled critical gaps in Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem: Contour, Sonobuoy and Velero. Additionally, I drove the creation of Heptio Labs, an incubator for open source projects. - **VP Engineering at NodeSource** (Apr 2015 - Feb 2017) As VP Engineering, I was responsible for Product Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering and Open Source. - **Director of Engineering at Adobe** (Jul 2014 - Mar 2015) I led engineering for Creative Cloud Assets. My team designed and built the Web application, including a content-aware plugin model and implemented the Web experience and collaboration features for Creative Cloud Libraries. - **Sr. Engineering Manager at Adobe** (Nov 2010 - Jun 2014) My team designed and built the Adobe Creative Cloud Web application (https://assets.adobe.com) and I provided the initial design and architecture for our HTTP API. - **Engineering Manager at Adobe** (Nov 2004 - Oct 2010) Managed a distributed software development team that built application management technologies for the Creative Suite and Acrobat. - **Director of Engineering at Alot.com** (Jul 2002 - Jul 2004) Managed software development team focused on building connected desktop consumer software. Primary architect for the core client runtime and Javascript-based framework and designed a download manager application to more reliably download and install client applications. - **Director of Engineering at Passlogix** (Mar 2001 - Mar 2002) Co-developer of the initial prototype of the v-GO product, primarily the credential storage management and credential insertion components. Led engineering teams for v-GO Exchange and v-GO Single Sign On (SSO). - **Director of Systems Development at Red Sky Interactive** (Feb 2000 - Feb 2001) Recruited the entire Systems Development staff for the New York office (Software Engineering, Operations, Information Architecture, Web Development and Quality Assurance) and managed its growth to the second largest technology team in the company in less than one year. - **Technical Director at Brand Dialogue** (Oct 1998 - Jan 2000) Led a small team of backend Web developers building Web applications for clients. Grew and mentored engineers while developing a multiple platform technology strategy for the business. - **Senior Software Engineer at Brand Dialogue** (Oct 1997 - Oct 1998) Built backend services and Web applications for multiple clients. - **Senior Software Engineer at New York University - Polytechnic School of Engineering** (Sep 1993 - Oct 1997) Software developer for the Center for Applied Large-scale Computing distributed systems research lab. ## Skills ### Technical - Cloud Computing - CSS - DevOps - Distributed Systems - Git - JavaScript - REST - Ruby - Software Design - Software Development - Software Engineering - Web Development - Web Services ### Business - Agile Methodologies - Agile Project Management - Engineering Management - SaaS ### Other - Representational State Transfer (REST) - Scalability - Software as a Service (SaaS) - Web Applications ## Publications - The Inevitability of Atwood’s Law — techish.offprint.app (Jun 2026) https://techish.offprint.app/a/3mp5gbbhrkt23-the-inevitability-of-atwoods-law - Why the most advanced technology solution isn’t always the correct one — LeadDev (Aug 2022) https://leaddev.com/technical-decision-making/why-most-advanced-technology-solution-isnt-always-correct-one - How engineering, design and product form the ‘software trinity’ — LeadDev (Jun 2022) https://leaddev.com/cross-functional-collaboration/how-engineering-design-and-product-form-software-trinity - Should engineering managers write code? — LeadDev (Apr 2022) https://leaddev.com/skills-new-managers/should-engineering-managers-write-code - Fighting the mirrortocracy with inclusive hiring — LeadDev (Feb 2022) https://leaddev.com/hiring-onboarding-retention/fighting-mirrortocracy-inclusive-hiring - Want to advance underrepresented folks in tech? Sponsor them. — LeadDev (Dec 2021) https://leaddev.com/diversity-inclusion/want-advance-underrepresented-folks-tech-sponsor-them - How to make pathfinder soup — Increment Magazine (Nov 2021) https://increment.com/planning/software-development-with-pathfinders/ - Creating open source projects for your community — LeadDev (Oct 2021) https://leaddev.com/process/creating-open-source-projects-your-community - Serverless is the new LAMP stack — LeadDev (Jun 2021) https://leaddev.com/architecture-microservices/serverless-new-lamp-stack - The thin line between technology advocacy and ideology — LeadDev (Apr 2021) https://leaddev.com/technical-direction-strategy/thin-line-between-technology-advocacy-and-ideology - Managing technical risk — LeadDev (Feb 2021) https://leaddev.com/technical-direction-strategy/managing-technical-risk - Onboarding remote, early-career engineers — LeadDev (Dec 2020) https://leaddev.com/hiring-onboarding-retention/onboarding-remote-early-career-engineers - Navigating conflict between management styles — LeadDev (Nov 2020) https://leaddev.com/communication-relationships/navigating-conflict-between-management-styles - The problem with "the platform" — LeadDev (Aug 2020) https://leaddev.com/technical-direction-strategy/problem-platform - How to build a startup engineering team — Increment Magazine (Nov 2019) https://increment.com/teams/how-to-build-a-startup-engineering-team/