Freddy Knuth

Senior Engineer · Architect · Technical Lead

Austin, TX · London, UK · Madrid, Spain · freddy@halkonmedia.com · 817.721.7117 · https://www.linkedin.com/in/freddy-knuth

SUMMARY

Engineer and architect with 25+ years across platforms, distributed systems, and security tooling. Solves problems at every layer — from debugging production fires to bridging the organizational gaps that block delivery. Builds what doesn’t exist, debugs what others can’t, and raises the engineering bar for the teams around the work. Bilingual English / Spanish.

CORE COMPETENCIES

Proficiencies

Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript / JavaScript, SQL
Frontend: Vue, React
Data & streaming: Cassandra, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Kafka, NATS / NATS JetStream, Quine Streaming Graph
Architecture: Microservices, gRPC, Protobuf, REST, event-driven systems
Infrastructure & delivery: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, CloudFormation, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, FluxCD), PagerDuty, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger

Domain expertise

Real-time media & communications — WebRTC, SFU, TURN, XMPP, client-side encryption
Automation — deployment pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, process automation (RPA), system integration and orchestration
Platform engineering — internal developer tools, component libraries, data layers, API gateways, multi-tenant / white-label platforms
Observability — end-to-end tracing, alerting, incident response, PCI-compliant environments

Engineering practice

Technical leadership across teams and organizations. Mentors engineers, sets code-review and deployment standards, builds onboarding documentation, and delivers internal tech talks. Fluent in AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cline).

EXPERIENCE

Senior Software Engineer

CrowdStrike — Oct 2022 – Apr 2026

Lead development of CrowdStrike’s Zero Trust Assessment, a real-time endpoint scoring system that evaluates device security posture and gates enterprise access through integrations with Okta, Zscaler, and other identity providers.
Lead the vulnerability ingestion pipeline for Risk Repository, a platform that aggregates cloud security, vulnerability, and configuration assessment data into a unified risk view across customer assets.
Provide the foundational risk data consumed by CrowdStrike’s Attack Path Analysis product, enabling customers to identify and prioritize exploitable paths to critical systems.
Design and build a proof-of-concept evaluating Quine, a real-time streaming graph platform, for large-scale security data analysis on Kubernetes.
Contribute to CrowdStrike’s Risk Platform, extending detection-evidence capabilities across all security product lines.
Lead recurring service health reviews, proactively identifying issues before they reach customers and routing incidents to the right engineers for faster resolution.
Establish Go development standards through recurring code review sessions covering idiomatic patterns, testing strategies, and error-handling conventions adopted across the team.

Senior Staff Engineer

ZenBusiness — Feb 2022 – Oct 2022

Designed and implemented a third-party integration enabling customers to securely store their legal documents — formation filings, compliance records, and registered-agent correspondence — in their preferred cloud storage provider, including OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox.
Identified and resolved query performance issues in the Django-based customer portal by restructuring ORM queries, reducing page load times from minutes-long timeouts to sub-second responses during on-call shifts.

Software Developer (II → V)

Rackspace — Feb 2014 – Feb 2022 (San Antonio / Austin)

Encore Platform (2014 – 2018)

Architected and developed a component library in AngularJS enabling rapid development of micro UIs for Rackspace’s internal customer support platform, growing to serve approximately 46 applications used by Rackspace customer support agents.
Contributed to the architecture of Rackspace’s unified search platform, reducing live-call account lookup from 2.5 minutes (handled across five fallback teams) to 30 seconds handled by the main phone line alone.
Designed and built an application framework that unified the support platform’s micro UIs into a single seamless experience with cross-application communication and shared session management.
Extended the platform’s support capabilities from cloud products to dedicated hosting.
Introduced dockerized deployment for the unified support platform, enabling preview environments for code review and faster release cycles.
Increased release frequency from monthly to weekly to daily by enforcing and encouraging PR review standards and coaching development teams on smaller, trackable deployments.
Led platform infrastructure migrations from Rackspace’s internal cloud infrastructure to Mesos/Marathon, and subsequently to OpenShift.

Global Data Layer (2019)

Architected and led development of an aggregated data platform using StreamSets pipelines, consolidating customer information from cloud, dedicated, and legacy services to power Rackspace’s internal support platform and enable broader data consumption across internal teams.

Digital Workforce / RPA Platform (2019 – 2022)

Assumed technical leadership of the RPA platform; stood up AWS production environment within six weeks.
Delivered 15 automation processes to production, saving over 2,200 tracked hours in the first 16 months across 10 business units including finance, customer support, security operations, and account provisioning.
Onboarded Ernst & Young and TechM as outsourced development partners, integrating their automation teams into the platform’s deployment pipeline, coding standards, and PCI-compliant staging environment.
Architected four AWS deployment environments — development, canary, staging, and production — with a multi-tenant development orchestrator supporting separate test environments per development partner.
Designed PCI-compliant cross-network architecture enabling AWS-hosted automation to securely reach internal corporate systems.
Built alerting for infrastructure health and automation process failures, enabling proactive incident response.
Built CI/CD pipeline for automation artifact deployment.
Grew team to three developers and one business systems analyst; mentored engineers toward technical leadership and authored developer onboarding standards.

Earlier Career (1999 – 2014)

Special Projects Developer, UI Architect (Contractor) · Boomerang Commerce · Oct 2013 – Feb 2014 Design with Product Owners Security Model of the Analytics Engine Interface. Review design patterns to be used in the implementation of new UI. Architect New UI Layout/Design for the redesign of the Analytics Engine.

VP of Technology (Partner) · Tetherit, Inc. · Sep 2011 – Aug 2013 Develop Flask based server side applications with the use of Jinja2 templates. Advance Bootstrap and Compass to automatically compile SASS files for CSS purposes. Utilize AMD/RequireJS to develop JavaScript modules.

Senior Developer / Systems Architect · Cinsay, Inc. · 2007 – Jul 2011 Initiated expansion of HTML5 Version for FLEX Development in support of Apple devices. Managed new in-house development of Cinsay Video CMS Application. Named co-inventor on 3 active US patents for interactive shoppable-video technology (US 9,674,584 · US 10,438,249 · US 12,223,528; priority 2008).

Senior Developer · Metrosplash Systems Group, Inc. · Sep 2003 – Feb 2010 Developed and maintained Profit Center using a bridge between Java and PHP. Migrated MySQL Database to PostgreSQL Database. Created, managed and provided support for Back Office Operating System (BOSS) in PHP.

Senior Programmer / Lead Developer · Comstock Data Mining · 2000 – 2003 Published okayamigo.com (Pinch Point rankings, forums and a personal Black Book). Published shipmatesdates.com (for Sony), and introduced a new feature (Crush List). Migrated members from outdated database schema to a more relational defined database.

Web Programmer · Matchmaker.com · 1999 – 2000 Development support for the communities at Matchmaker.com. Helped in the creation of affinity websites.

INDEPENDENT & CONSULTING ENGAGEMENTS

Systems Architect & Engineer

Banklot — Feb 2023 – present

Architect a multi-operator gaming platform with a unified API consumed by both web users and Java desktop clients, using Go microservices, gRPC, and an HTTP REST gateway.
Design the NATS JetStream streaming layer for distributing game results and transaction data across operators, products, and environments.
Build the shared Go framework providing config, tracing, logging, gRPC, and HTTP server bootstrap so new services spin up with consistent infrastructure.
Build a Go-based cross-platform print service for Windows, macOS, and Linux, receiving requests from the web app and driving attached thermal printers.
Design the Protobuf toolchain compiling a single source of API definitions into Go and TypeScript types, ensuring contract safety between backend services and frontend UIs.

Systems Architect & Engineer

Amera IoT Inc. — 2020 – Dec 2022

Patented picture-and-PIN encryption technology, applied in AmeraShare — an end-to-end encrypted collaboration tool for messaging, file sharing, and video.

Architected and built the platform backend API and the user-to-user encrypted contact system, where a shared picture and PIN derive the encryption keys securing all communications including chat, file transfer, and video calls.
Designed and shipped encrypted video communication platform where user keys never leave the client, ensuring the server infrastructure cannot access call content.
Extended Jitsi Meet, an open-source video conferencing platform, with custom modules to enable encrypted group video calling while maintaining scalability for concurrent sessions.
Stood up a Prosody-based XMPP server powering AmeraShare’s chat and in-app file transfer, with a custom Lua module bridging XMPP authentication to the web-api’s HTTP cookie sessions.
Developed the secure communication platform UI in React and an Electron-based desktop wrapper, supporting encrypted messaging, file sharing, video calls, and group conferencing.
Developed encryption implementations for both desktop and web, evaluating the security tradeoffs between client-side key derivation and host-based key derivation to define the product’s trust model.
Owned platform infrastructure end-to-end, migrating from Rackspace Public Cloud to AWS with CloudFormation templates for test and production environments and Docker Compose for local development.
Built a Docker-based local development environment providing developers with an isolated, self-contained workspace.
Built CI/CD pipeline promoting code from branch merge through automated test deployment to production.

Lead Developer (Contractor)

LegalPing — Nov 2011 – Mar 2013

A Q&A platform for legal professionals, similar to StackOverflow but for lawyers to ask and answer questions from other lawyers.

Maintain and Support application created in PHP/Javascript.
Integrate SendGrid into application for E-Mail purposes/notifications/mass E-Mail.
Support Mobile Team in changes/enhancements/integrations on API.
Integrate Graphic Designs provided.
Developed Rest API for use in mobile application.
Implement functionality defined in the Wireframes.
Worked with team on different implementations of Middleware (CodeIgniter, In-House).
Implement UI interface based on Wireframes provided by Client.

2021 · 2020 · 2019