# Daniel Kawalsky > Senior Software Engineer at HashiCorp Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/danielkawalsky I enjoy building software across the stack. Whether it’s designing secure, reliable APIs or creating responsive interfaces, I like building custom solutions and getting involved in how systems work end-to-end. I’m currently part of the HashiCorp organization within IBM Cloud, where I work on Terraform. My focus is Terraform Actions, a recently GA capability that extends the Terraform lifecycle with provider-driven automation, enabling teams to integrate custom operations directly into their infrastructure workflows. Previously at IBM Cloud, I worked on networking and data infrastructure including Private DNS and Cloud Databases. I helped bring Global Load Balancing with health checks from proof-of-concept to general availability across 21 data centers, and later worked on the automation platform that manages tens of thousands of customer databases running across more than 100 Kubernetes clusters. Across these roles, my work has centered on distributed systems, automation, and operating cloud platforms at scale, with a strong focus on reliability, observability, and operational efficiency. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ HashiCorp Jan 2025 – Present - Contribute to Terraform Actions, a recently GA capability that extends the Terraform lifecycle with provider-driven automation. - Develop faster engineering workflows by integrating MCP servers and tooling such as Figma, Jira, and testing frameworks to streamline development, improve collaboration, and accelerate iteration. - Designing and implementing the team’s first on-call system, focusing on actionable alerting, reducing operational noise, and enabling fast, effective incident response. - Build platform features that allow providers to integrate custom operations directly into infrastructure workflows. - Collaborate with product and design teams to translate customer feedback into platform capabilities. - Develop features in a Ruby on Rails codebase while using AI-assisted development workflows to rapidly iterate on new functionality. ### Senior Software Engineer @ IBM Jan 2019 – Jan 2026 I have been with 2 teams within IBM Cloud: Private DNS: Took Global Load Balancing with health checks from POC to GA across 21 data centers. Built several internal services (including one that manages VPC infrastructure), designed microservices in Go/gRPC/etcd, and owned CI/CD pipelines that deployed our services worldwide. My work spanned backend dev, DevOps, networking (BGP, systemd, DNS proxies), and production automation. Cloud Databases (current): I build and operate the automation that runs tens of thousands of customer databases across 100+ Kubernetes clusters. That includes controllers/operators for renewing certificates, rotating credentials, applying allowlists, managing backups, performing image updates, and coordinating releases at global scale. I focus heavily on reliability and operations, building observability dashboards, tuning alerting (Prometheus/Alertmanager/PagerDuty), and debugging customer-impacting issues during on-call. I also analyze alert patterns and cluster metrics to reduce noise and improve stability. On the platform side, I’ve led several multi-cluster engineering efforts: Profitability & efficiency: Drove initiatives that increased revenue and cut infrastructure costs by $13M+ (autoscaling fixes, worker/node consolidation, removing orphaned storage, and redesigning CPU provisioning models). Release modernization: Rebuilt our monolithic release system into independent ArgoCD pipelines, reducing release cycles from weeks to hours. In-place upgrades: Helped architect and deliver the platform that enables in-place DB upgrades, now used for 10K+ upgrades/month. Compliance & security: Designed credential-rotation and IAM/network-based access control systems to meet PCI 4.0, C5, FSCloud, and ENS-High requirements. Across both teams, I’ve worn many hats — backend engineer, infrastructure engineer, SRE, and now team lead for platform-level initiatives — always with a focus on reliability, automation, and measurable business impact. ### Creative Technologist @ Los Angeles Times Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Los Angeles, California, United States In short: augmented reality, photogrammetry, and deploying cheesy burgers to production. The exciting challenge of bringing a truly unique experience to thousands of readers and supporting all of their devices was made especially fun by the series of cheeseburger photoshoots we did around LA. 10/10 internship! ### Software Engineering Intern @ SpaceX Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater Los Angeles Area Enterprise Information Systems Developed front- and back-end features for an inventory resource and task management application that integrated internal REST APIs to automate form-filling and task-tracking, which accelerates rocket assembly. ### Co-Founder and Director of Outreach @ Scope USC Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Greater Los Angeles Area Scope USC is about teaching the computer science student to become a computer science developer. Recruitment efforts led hundreds to apply to become members of the first Scope squad. Over a single semester, Scope has become a tight community of students with eager dev DNA. Last semester, Scope succeeded in teaching its members to develop for iOS and Android. For Demo Night, reached out to local tech companies to create a meetup on campus during which members show off their mobile development projects. ### Research Fellow @ USC Institute for Creative Technologies Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Playa Vista, CA Developed a VR application for the Mixed Reality Lab to alleviate nausea experienced during rapid teleportation. ### Software Developer @ MODAL Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Dallas, TX As the first hire, I was responsible for designing and developing a web platform for three areas: events, transportation, and leasing. The web application included separate routes and permissions for users, employees, and admins, each with unique access to data. This meant cleaning up the existing web application's data model and moving its database from Parse to Firebase, as well as integrating an online payment service. ### Student Field Tester @ ZTE Corporation Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 Reported bugs and suggested improvements for ZTE Android hardware, particularly mobile devices ## Education ### Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science University of Southern California Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 ### High School Pearce High School Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/daniel-kawalsky - Website: https://www.danielkawalsky.com - Website: https://portfolio.danielkawalsky.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/danielkawalsky JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/danielkawalsky/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22