# Kayne Barclay

> Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Benchling

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/kayne

Senior Staff Software Engineer with 13+ years in full-stack, infrastructure, and platform engineering. Natural leader of cross-functional and strategic initiatives involving production infrastructure and DevOps. Expert in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, Java, and CI/CD. A strong communicator and collaborator, adept at building relationships across teams, driving alignment on high-impact projects, and mentoring engineers to uplevel their skills and accelerate developer velocity.

## Work Experience
### Senior Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Abstractions @ Benchling
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
• Spearheaded an Async Compute platform on Kubernetes for untrusted and variable-resource workloads, enabling new product SKUs for running customer-provided code. Led the migration of another team’s bulk PDF export feature to the platform, boosting the success rate from 90% to 99.9%, resolving a major customer pain point and reducing support incidents by 75%.
• Drove cross-team initiative with Security to automate AWS SSO and Okta group setup using Terraform, reducing Service onboarding from 5 PRs across multiple repositories to a single PR, cutting setup time by 80% and reducing errors associated with manual configuration.
• Extended Services Framework to unlock new use cases and accelerate Monolith migration, cutting the projected timeline from 12 months to 3 months.
• Operated and maintained ~50 Kubernetes clusters, e.g. upgrades of Kubernetes, AMIs, Karpenter and Istio, keeping the company compliant with our strict customer agreements. Operated 5 Tier 1 Services, providing base platform capabilities to the whole org.
• Integrated Argo CD for parallel deployment across ~50 Kubernetes clusters. Built dev tools reducing deployment workflows from 15 minutes to 30 seconds.

### Engineering Lead, Release Engineering @ Benchling
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area
• Founding/Lead Engineer of Release Engineering. Mentored engineers (including Principals), scaled team to 6, and covered management duties while hiring for a dedicated manager.
• Defined North Star for Benchling CI/CD. Responsible for the team’s quarterly planning, scoping and estimation, and defining the roadmap across multiple quarters based on the North Star.
• Rearchitected our SDLC process, and optimized various aspects of our deployment process, reducing time-to-merge from hours to minutes, and lead-time-to-change from days to hours.
• Led E2E automation for testing and performing quarterly deployments to our compliance controlled (GxP) environments, decreasing post-deployment incidents by 75% and reducing ongoing KTLO by 50%.

### Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure @ Benchling
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area
• Joined Benchling as fifth member of the Infrastructure org. Later took on lead responsibilities, overseeing 5+ disparate projects.
• Generalized monolith-specific release pipelines and Slack-based release communications. Used this to build MVP Services Framework with support for SAM/Lambda Services.
• Designed and built ECS based Services Framework for standard deployments across ~15 clusters, later migrated to Kubernetes, now supporting 20+ container-based Services.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Atlassian
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California
• As Scrummaster, transitioned a highly available user trait system cross-geo to our team in SF. Mentored engineers in front-end best practices, feature leading and project management.
• Planned and accurately estimated the implementation of user trait targeted contextual surveys, in collaboration with a domain expert.

### Engineering Lead @ Atlassian
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California
• Led implementation of scalable in-product app discovery, and drove engagement by extending website search with landing pages, partnering with Product, Design, and Marketing.
• Onboarded a new team in India to the Marketplace’s front-end, helping transfer ownership of product.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Atlassian
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, California
• Replaced outdated Marketplace home and search pages with a quick, responsive and modern implementation written with React, Redux and Webpack.
• Designed and built Marketplace vendor reporting dashboards, composed of tables and graphs, allowing vendors to analyze their app sales in near real time.

### Software Engineer @ Atlassian
Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, California
• Migrated Jira project configuration from global admin to project admin, providing better delegated access. Built a new front-end experience with Backbone/Marionette.
• Extended billing system to support per-user pricing. Adapted billing system to accommodate for Jira product split. Extended in-product billing to allow for subscribing to any Atlassian product.

### Software Engineer @ Orion Health
Jan 2012 – Jan 2013
• Full-stack engineer on J2EE application for clinical workflow engine.


## Education
### Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Software Engineering
University of Auckland
Jan 2008 – Jan 2011


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kaynebarclay

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Source: https://flows.cv/kayne
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kayne/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22