Kevin Gessner

Architectural designer, maker, and software engineer

https://kevingessner.com
hello@kevingessner.com

New York City/Kingston, NY
I use he/him pronouns

Where I've Been

Spitzer School of Architecture City College of New York, https://ssa.ccny.cuny.edu

Master of Architecture, May 2024

• Graduated with a 4.0/4.0 GPA and received the AIA Medal for Academic Excellence
• Completed comprehensive design studio work, tackling problems taken directly from the streets of New York City
• Developed expertise in representation through drawing, rendering, and scale model fabrication
• Gained experience with Rhino & Grasshopper, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, & InDesign, and Esri ArcGIS
• Studied materials, building codes, structural physics, architectural history, and urban studies
• Received the competitive Castagna Scholarship for tuition and study abroad, and participated in a month-long design studio intensive with Spitzer faculty and EMBT Architects in Barcelona

Etsy Inc. Brooklyn, New York, https://etsy.com

Senior Staff Software Engineer, March 2018 – June 2021
Staff Software Engineer, March 2015 – March 2018
Senior Software Engineer, November 2013 – March 2015

• Extensive software development, architecture, and leadership experience on both user-facing and backend infrastructure features, across Etsy’s entire e-commerce stack
• Responsible for leading engineering teams on multi-year, business-critical projects, including the migration of Etsy’s search infrastructure to Google Cloud and Kubernetes, rebuilding the Etsy.com homepage, and rewriting the company’s email dispatch system
• Developed, tested, and deployed production code in PHP, Scala, Java, Python, Shell, HTML, CSS, and more, for systems handling hundreds of millions of daily requests and with 99.95%+ reliability
• Wrote posts for the engineering blog on "Responsive emails that really work and "How Etsy caches: hashing, Ketama, and cache smearing"

Fog Creek Software now Glitch, Inc., New York, New York

June 2009 – October 2013

• Member of the team developing Kiln, a source code management web application, from its inception
• Server-side coding in C# in the ASP.NET MVC framework and Python, front-end work in Javascript, CSS/LESS, and HTML, and development of native apps
• Full-stack software development from UI designs to database optimization, from build and monitoring scripts to support tools and automated tests
• From April 2012, served as Kiln Team Lead, guiding overall product development and managing the team of two to seven developers, while interfacing with sales, support, and system administration

Personal and Freelance Contract Work http://kevingessner.com

2006 – Present

• Created websites and applications both personally and under contract
• Developed FunctionFlip, an open-source keyboard-management utility for Mac OS X, featured as a Macworld Magazine "Mac Gem" shortly after its release in 2008

Todd Theatre, University of Rochester Rochester, New York, https://rochester.edu/theater

Scene Shop Assistant, August 2006 – May 2010

• Fabricated sets and props for two shows per semester, under the direction of the Production Manager
• Participated in painting and set-strike crews

StyleNet remote, http://stylenet.com

Lead Developer, July 2007 – January 2009

• Sole developer working closely with the co-founders on all aspects of software development
• Developed and tested features including online appointment scheduling, an internal CMS for clients to manage text and image content on their sites, and backend user management for the company
• Led two other temporary remote developers reporting to me

What I Know

Prior Education

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

Bachelor of Arts cum laude, May 2010

• Majored in Mathematics and Computer Science
• Graduated with a 3.73/4.0 GPA and recognized on the Dean’s List (Highest Honors) for six of seven eligible semesters
• Recipient of the four-year, full-tuition Renaissance Scholarship