Keith Kurson
Strategic Engineering Leader & Full-Stack Developer

Led Developer Relations and headed Glitch engineering within Fastly while staying hands-on with technical work. Created a startup-like environment inside Fastly to drive innovation in developer tools and WASM deployment.

• Built the technical foundation for Fastly's developer platform by evolving Glitch to showcase WASM and edge computing capabilities, increasing developer adoption
• Led the development of CLI tooling for bundling and deploying WASM to edge computing systems, pioneering bleeding-edge technology that formed a core part of Fastly's strategy
• Managed and optimized cloud spend across the department, consulting with each team to identify and eliminate over $3M in unnecessary AWS expenses while maintaining performance
• Rewrote Glitch.com from legacy React to Remix, creating new data patterns that made the most of Fastly's edge network and improved page load times by 60%
• Built a team of engineers who consistently delivered great results across the company, with a 100% Glitch --> Fastly retention rate and an increase in team velocity

Led development of Glitch's core platform, helping millions of developers build and deploy web apps across thousands of servers with a focus on community-driven growth.

• Led Glitch's largest engineering team, building tools used by over 5 million developers worldwide
• Scaled the platform to support 3M+ applications running simultaneously on a home-grown, non-Kubernetes infrastructure while maintaining 99.9% uptime
• Created and maintained multiple open-source libraries for Glitch starter kits, which were used by 75,000+ developers and required staying current with upstream updates from React, Svelte, and other frameworks
• Rebuilt Glitch's web IDE from scratch, making it 40% faster while maintaining compatibility with existing projects
• Created Glimmer, a publishing platform using NextJS and Prismic that let creators showcase their work with Glitch's unique style, driving an increase in project sharing and overall traffic
• Developed code sharing and remixing features that helped Glitch grow user base by 35% year-over-year through organic word-of-mouth

Led initiatives to modernize healthcare.gov and other key government services at Nava, a public benefit company focused on improving civic infrastructure. As an engineering lead I was responsible for writing code, and making technical decisions on critical code that still powers healthcare.gov today.

• Rebuilt healthcare.gov's frontend from the ground up, leading development of a new application flow used by 12+ million Americans during open enrollment periods
• Created a 'decision engine' that tracked user progress through potentially hundreds of questions, optimizing the application flow so most users could complete it in fewer steps
• Brought React to government projects, introducing modern web development approaches while maintaining security compliance and passing all FedRAMP requirements
• Led a team of 22 engineers, making technical decisions on critical code that still powers healthcare.gov today
• Built an API layer that improved healthcare.gov's verification speed and reduced error rates during periods of peak traffic
• Guided healthcare.gov through security audits by developing thorough documentation that reduced audit completion time by 30%
• Led engineering on the Integrated Benefits initiative in Vermont, creating a tool that cut benefits processing time from 3 weeks to 4 days

Worked as an embedded tech leader within NYC government, leading a small cross-functional team to modernize city services and build frameworks for long-term civic tech improvements.

• Conducted field research with 50+ social workers and people experiencing homelessness to identify high-impact tech solutions
• Improved the WorkerConnect platform to streamline operations for 4,000+ NYC social workers, reducing case processing time by 20%
• Built data analysis tools that helped the Center of Economic Opportunity turn complex poverty data into policy recommendations, influencing program funding
• Created CityBook, a platform that helped 35+ non-profits quickly launch mobile-friendly sites based on community needs identified through neighborhood research
• Developed reusable technical patterns that were later adopted by 7 NYC agencies
• Introduced agile methods within government constraints to deliver citizen-focused solutions faster than traditional government development timelines
• Spent 4 hours every day riding the subway to shadow social workers across NYC boroughs, ensuring solutions addressed real problems facing New Yorkers

Founded and grew this virtual pet site into a million-dollar company as a teenager. Now serves thousands of dedicated users with some sticking around for almost 20 years, while serving as my personal technical playground for rapid development cycles.

• Founded and grew Subeta into a million-dollar company as a teenager, building one of the most successful virtual pet platforms of its era with 500,000+ registered accounts
• Built and maintained the full tech stack (PHP/Laravel, Redis, MySQL) handling 3M+ daily interactions while continuously adding features based on user feedback
• Set up early PayPal integration when most similar sites were still processing payments manually, enabling scaling to 50,000+ paying users
• Managed a distributed team of 10-30 around the world over two decades, developing leadership skills while still in high school
• Kept the platform running reliably for 20 years with 99.8% uptime through practical technical decisions and forward-looking design
• Currently migrating the platform from legacy PHP code to Laravel, reducing load times by 60% and server costs by 35% while preserving complex game mechanics
• Balanced adding new features quickly while maintaining stability for a complex game with 20 years of accumulated features and 15,000+ unique virtual items