About
I'm Kristof Kowalski, a Staff Engineer who has spent the last decade building platform tooling for product teams. I work at the layer where observability, deployment, and developer experience meet.
Before that, I was a backend engineer at three startups in a row, all of which I joined at around the twenty-engineer mark. The pattern taught me a lot about what good infrastructure looks like when it has to scale to support people, not just services.
I write about the work on the blog and build small tools on the side. Most of them are Go CLIs, which is the highest praise I can give to any tool.
- 2025 – present Founder Hyper · Melbourne
Building Hyper, the live layer for neighbourhood discovery and commerce. Venues post offers, sell products, run events; consumers see what's happening nearby and act on it, all in one app. Flutter, Go, PostgreSQL, Firebase, Cloudflare R2, Stripe, Vertex AI.
- 2025 – present Staff Engineer (AI, CI/CD & Observability) ANZ · Melbourne
Leading technical strategy across AI, CI/CD, and Observability. Defining CI/CD standards, uplifting platform patterns, and evolving observability practices through OpenTelemetry and modern telemetry architecture. AI Engineering, CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Golang, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform.
- 2022 – 2025 Observability Engineering Lead ANZ · Melbourne
Led the Observability Engineering team. Implemented OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and metrics across Golang, Java, JS, and Python. Maintained an OpenTelemetry distribution for organisational use. OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, GCP.
- 2021 – 2022 Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead ANZ · Melbourne
Led a team of SREs; owned reliability and performance of critical systems; defined and monitored SLIs and SLOs. OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, GKE, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, GCP.
- 2020 – 2021 Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) ANZ · Melbourne
- 2019 – 2020 Senior Cloud (DevOps) Engineer Momenton · Melbourne
Consulting across finance and government. Designed scalable, resilient infrastructures on AWS and GCP; applied Chaos Engineering to harden systems. AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Terraform, Ansible, Kafka, Golang.
- 2018 – 2020 Co-Founder and CTO VolAir · Basel
Co-founded a blockchain platform for private jet chartering. Built the smart-contract layer, web and mobile apps, and cloud infra. AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ethereum, Solidity, React, React Native, Node.js.
- 2017 – 2018 Principal Software Engineer (DevOps) Novartis NIBR · Basel
Drove DevOps adoption and cloud solutions at NIBR. Established CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code standards. AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Grafana.
- 2014 – 2017 Co-Founder and CIO Simply Migrate · Basel
Co-founded a CLI-driven legacy mail and file data migration tool. Acquired by Mimecast. AWS, Azure, Node.js, MS SQL, Docker, Kubernetes, TeamCity, VSO.
- 2014 – 2016 SharePoint Consultant Novartis · Basel
- 2014 – 2015 Co-Founder and Full-Stack Developer Exists
- 2012 – 2014 Web Systems Architect City of Sydney
- 2011 – 2012 SharePoint Infrastructure Architect BBC · London
- 2011 Co-Founder and CIO estoii · London
- 2009 – 2011 Senior Messaging and Collaboration Engineer Atkins · Epsom
- 2008 Premier SharePoint Support Engineer Microsoft · Reading
- 2006 – 2008 Senior Messaging and Collaboration Engineer Atkins · Epsom
- 2004 – 2005 Senior Engineer Wavex · London
- 2002 – 2003 Director, Consultant Staesis Network · Sydney
- 2001 – 2002 Network Engineer Krowten Network · North Sydney
- 1999 – 2001 Senior Systems Administrator Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines · Sydney
- 1997 – 1999 Senior Systems Administrator Xircom · North Sydney
- 1995 – 1997 Server Support Engineer Compaq · Sydney
- 1993 – 1994 Systems Administrator McCann Worldgroup · North Sydney
You don't actually want to write a service. You want to write a tool that you can ship from a single binary and never look at again.
A friend, after I shipped the second Go CLI of the year