Kevin Stewart

Kevin Stewart is an engineering executive focused on building systems and teams to build products. He has helped shape the engineering culture at a number of startups, digital agencies and cloud companies. Kevin is particularly experienced in leading remote and distributed teams to consistently deliver quality products.

As the founder of Build Discipline, Kevin works fractionally with companies that have outgrown "everyone just codes" but aren't ready for a full-time executive. He's had the experience of being the first engineering leader in the building, the one who arrived after the bad demo, and the one who had to say no to a roadmap everyone loved. Different companies, same discipline.

Career: 15

Build Discipline

Self-employed · Kenmore, Washington, US · Remote

Aug 2026 - Present

Helping companies and teams achieve better outcomes, not just more output.

Fractional engineering leadership for seed-to-Series B product teams that need an experienced hand, without the cost and risk of a full-time executive hire.

Splice

Full-time · Remote

Mar 2023 - Aug 2026

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.

Harvest

Full-time · Remote

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.

Fastly

Full-time · Remote

Jul 2018 - Jul 2019

As VP of Platform Engineering, I led Data Engineering, Developer Productivity and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

Heptio

Full-time · Hybrid

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.

Nodesource

Full-time · Remote

Apr 2015 - Feb 2017

As VP Engineering, I was responsible for Product Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering and Open Source.

Adobe

Full-time · Seattle, Washington, US · On-site

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.

Adobe

Full-time · Seattle, Washington, US · On-site

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.

Adobe

Full-time · Seattle, Washington, US · On-site

Nov 2004 - Oct 2010

Managed a distributed software development team that built application management technologies for the Creative Suite and Acrobat.

Alot.com

Full-time · New York, New York, US · On-site

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.

Passlogix

Full-time · New York, New York, US · On-site

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).

Red Sky Interactive

Full-time · New York, New York, US · On-site

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.

Brand Dialogue

New York, New York, US · On-site

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.

Brand Dialogue

Full-time · New York, New York, US · On-site

Oct 1997 - Oct 1998

Built backend services and Web applications for multiple clients.

New York University

Full-time · Brooklyn, New York, US · On-site

Sep 1993 - Oct 1997

Software developer for the Center for Applied Large-scale Computing distributed systems research lab.