Profile
I build leverage in operationally complex businesses: software that improves business economics, platforms that eliminate recurring work, and teams that own outcomes. As an engineering leader and technical cofounder, I stay close to architecture and code while developing the judgment and autonomy that let others ship without me.
Experience
- Joined Verizon through its acquisition of Starry; continue leading Starry’s engineering and software work while building tools and systems to turn Verizon’s early fixed-wireless MDU deployments into repeatable planning, deployment, and operating workflows.
- Organizational leverage. Led an engineering organization of up to 15 people, including two managers, and hired 40+ engineers over time. Retained a high-performing team through restructuring and Chapter 11 by providing business context, setting clear priorities, and connecting roadmap decisions to revenue, retention, customer experience, and support efficiency.
- Engineering investment. Owned roadmap, architecture, delivery, operations, and vendors. With the CTO and business leaders, prioritized work by expected impact and engineering effort, directing scarce capacity toward revenue, cost, retention, and the path to free-cash-flow break-even.
- Business leverage. Recognized that Starry paid for gift cards even when recipients never claimed them. Proposed, designed, and built just-in-time fulfillment that purchased incentives at redemption, saving $1.28M over roughly two years with a ~53% redemption rate.
- Self-service economics. Built and rolled out an AI support platform using GraphQL, Amazon Bedrock, Vercel AI SDK, and Node.js, initially targeting complex workflows with high manual handling costs; resolved more than 75% of targeted conversations and saved approximately 10–15 minutes of representative time per successful interaction.
- Billing foundation. Designed and built Stripe-based billing from day one, including MongoDB replication for internal data access. Supported ~250,000 lifetime customers, 100,000 active at peak, 5 million successful payments, and $200M+ in gross lifetime volume.
- Revenue recovery. Automated unreturned-equipment reminders and charges, generating approximately $500,000 annually while reducing the unreturned-router rate by ~25% and avoiding replacement costs for equipment that would otherwise have been lost.
- Engineering leverage. Replaced dozens of bespoke data exports with a platform I designed and built: a YAML entry publishes authorized MongoDB datasets through HTTP snapshots and resumable change streams. New sources became configuration work instead of another engineering project.
- Platform defaults. Built shared services, frameworks, and libraries used by 50+ services and 25+ engineers—including service-to-service authentication, a REST framework, GraphQL data aggregation, and declarative MongoDB publication—eliminating repeated integration and data-export work.
Experience
- Designed and built one of the earliest production JavaScript MPEG-DASH live-streaming implementations on Media Source Extensions. Tuned adaptive bitrate selection, bandwidth estimation, and segment prefetching to balance startup time and buffering across mobile devices and variable networks.
- Led an approximately five-person team across web and TV products as Aereo grew to nearly 100,000 subscribers. Owned architecture, planning, code review, mentoring, and delivery, combining deep browser engineering with responsibility for the consumer experience.
- Turned firsthand experience of repetitive data-entry work into a browser-based CMS that replaced a restrictive licensed desktop product. Designed the workflow and built the frontend alongside a backend engineer; saved $250,000+ annually in licensing fees and reduced data-entry time by ~80%.
- Built reusable interactive guides for customers including Amazon and Asurion, separating shared product content from customer presentation so capture work could be done once and reused across deployments.
Open Source
Creator of AudioStore, Mix.js, TinyMusic, and fringe: reusable JavaScript libraries for streaming audio from IndexedDB, Web Audio synthesis and mixing, and message framing over persistent byte streams. · github.com/kevincennis
Skills
Leadership
Engineering strategy, investment prioritization, hiring, manager development, delegation, product scoping, cross-functional decision-making
AI Systems
Amazon Bedrock, Vercel AI SDK, LLM application architecture, RAG, tool-enabled workflows, evaluation
Payments
Stripe, subscription lifecycle, billing and payment operations
Languages
JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS
Systems
Node.js, AWS, Linux, Docker, MongoDB
Architecture
Distributed systems, platform design, service boundaries, GraphQL, REST APIs
Education
Berklee College of Music
Contemporary Writing & Production
2003 – 2005 · Boston, MA