Jonathan
Kalbfeld

I started in tech in 1993 in Detroit — changing backup tapes, managing UNIX accounts, learning how storage and networks actually work. By 1996 I was writing Perl at BBN Planet, one of the companies that built the internet. By 1997 I was at NASA Ames, where I met President Clinton and cleaned up a lot of other people's computers.

The dot-com era was a formative disaster. I was employee #72 at Webvan, watched the stock implode on IPO day while Yahoo DoS'd us, and spent time at Virgin Mobile building deployment systems and occasionally hanging out with Sir Richard. Briefly held a Series 7 and traded equities institutionally. Decided infrastructure was more interesting than other people's money.

From 2004 to 2014 I was a Senior Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, supporting the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, architecting infrastructure for the Dawn mission to the asteroid belt, and deploying the AMMOS software platform across the Deep Space Network.

Since JPL: VP Infrastructure at City National Bank, Sr. Engineer at Etsy, DevOps at Jukin Media, and eventually founding ThoughtWave Technologies. I operate four autonomous systems (AS54380, AS23026, and two others), own IPv4 and IPv6 address space, and run production infrastructure across multiple datacenters. I also serve as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases involving data forensics.