# Ken Shih > Staff Engineer at Sirona Medical Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kenshih Passionate Software Engineer most happy when synthesizing complexities into simplicity. Interested in technology's service to humankind, not for its own sake. Experienced Staff Engineer, Tech Lead, Manager, interested in staying more hands-on than not, but willing to do the needed glue work to make impact. Experience with Java, Typescript, Scala, Python, and others. AWS and cloud services. Kenshih.com ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Sirona Medical Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Manager @ Meetup Jan 2018 – Jan 2024 | Greater New York City Area Rotated variously as Team Lead, People Manager, and Individual Contributor of the course of 4 years. At various times, managed between 1-5 engineers of various disciplines and levels backend, front-end, full-stack, and iOS, from Software Engineer II to Staff (terminal IC role). Winner of "Save Meetup Money" Hackathon, as well as awards in other hackathons. ### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Meetup Jan 2016 – Jan 2024 Architected backend for Notification System and helped lead team to migrate and scale >100M monthly notifications from legacy to this new system, a feat the company had desired to do but had been unable to accomplish for multiple years/teams. Planned, managed, and safely executed high risk, past-EOL, upgrades of our Meetup's main database containing the most important operational data and models at Meetup, highest cost center, and the foundation of Meetup's tech, resulting in dramatic cost, performance, and quality of service improvements on each release. Besides the database itself, this required deep understanding, management, and hands-on work throughout our infrastructure, our application stack, verification systems, and analytics. Similarly, safely converted Meetup's main database from a single region to Global Database, establishing key Disaster Recovery capability, providing high-value features in our Enterprise contracts. Helped in executive right-hand projects like ecosystem-wide analysis and cost triages. Helped establish, scale, and refactor our 2 main graphql apis, our key public and private interfaces into our platform Helped establish mob-programming and architecture games in several teams. ### Engineering Lead @ Meetup Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | New York, NY Led Meetup Pro line-of-business to it's first $1M and grew from 3 engineers to 2 teams with its own on-call/DevOps rotation (1st of its kind at Meetup). Helped evangelize & adopt microservices architecture and increased code coverage across teams. Today it remains an important part of the business. ### Director of Product Engineering @ Piano Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | One World Trade Center, New York, New York Software Architect ### Senior Software Engineer @ Yodle Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 ### Senior Software Engineer @ Scripps Networks Jan 2008 – Jan 2014 ### Senior Software Engineer, Assistant Vice President @ Citigroup Jan 2005 – Jan 2008 • Architected, developed, and managed all aspects of one of the world’s top 20 career websites covering 42 different countries, 50,000 users • Architected and implemented custom online content management system supporting 50 users, overseeing a team of 5 • Researched, evaluated, and incorporated emerging technologies, processes, practices; including Spring, Flex2, JMX, Junit, Usability testing, SCRUM • Evangelized the adoption and use of open source software • Developed strategic programs for group, e.g. mission statement, marketing materials, hiring, employee training program, projects related to opening of Buffalo office • 2007 Citi Markets & Banking Business Services Recognition Award for Leadership, Quality and Service • At Citi: Highest rating in every biannual review cycle, highest ratings ever given, 2005-2007 ### Software Engineer/DBA @ Comet Systems, Inc. Jan 1998 – Jan 2005 • Managed the end-to-end database needs of the company, including business critical metrics such as user lifetime value and multidimensional analysis of revenue streams • Executed in the capacity of Data Architect, Developer, Project Lead, as well as DBA • Executed data services ranging from front end data collection, middle tier ETL, back end hardware management, and traditional DBA duties; primary database was a ½ TB data warehouse (including a one billion row table) on Solaris/Clariion, with Microsoft Analysis Services as an OLAP tool • Responsible for overall quality of all of the company's Web Development projects • Wrote project specifications, architecture, led code reviews, and mentored development team • Designed, managed, and implemented websites, code libraries, cgi administration tools, web statistics reporting • 2003 Comet Achievement Award • At Miva/Comet: Highest possible review category in every annual review cycle, 1997-2005 ### Software Engineer/DBA @ MIVA Direct Jan 1998 – Jan 2005 ### Financial Services Database Programmer @ Softbank Content Services Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 • Proposed, designed and implemented user-friendly database applications for worldwide distribution on intranet integrating automated Microsoft Applications • Created menu-driven report and analysis packages for budgeting, forecasting, and cost analysis. • Wrote technical documentation for developer reference and user instruction ## Education ### B.A. in English Yale University ### MFA in Theater, Playwriting UCLA ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kenshih1 --- Source: https://flows.cv/kenshih JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kenshih/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01