About

I'm Stephen Kiers. I build platforms, wrangle data, and try to make systems that don't page people at 3am.

I've been doing this long enough to have opinions and scars to back them up. I'm usually wrong about something—I just try to figure out what before it ships.

This is where I collect my thinking: principles, writing, projects. Reach out on LinkedIn if you want to talk.

Outside of Work

I played competitive soccer through my teens, and used to play a lot of music (guitar, sax, flute, trombone). These days my hobbies involve maintaining an 80-year-old house, woodworking, and tinkering with electronics. I recently restored some early 1900s Stanley hand planes—there's something satisfying about bringing century-old tools back to life. I've also gotten into 3D printing with my son, which is a fun way to prototype ideas and learn together.

I'm a compulsive learner. If I'm not reading books and articles on the latest trends in software, I'm probably watching youtube videos about science and maths, or down a rabbit hole on woodworking techniques or practical engineering. I wanted to be an architect growing up, and I guess I still am, just not houses.

Recent Reading List

Out of My Mind* - Sharon M. Draper.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
Wonder* - R. J. Palacio
Staff Engineer - Will Larson
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
The Wild Robot Trilogy* - Peter Brown
The Manager's Path - Camille Fournier
They Call Me No Sam!* - Drew Daywalt and Mike Lowery

* books enjoyed with my 9 year old son

Current Focus

RAG pipelines, vector search, and LLM-powered retrieval—figuring out where these tools genuinely help vs. where they’re just hype. I’m also improving my TypeScript patterns and exploring Rust for performance-critical systems. Lately I’ve been deep in designing internal RAG tooling that feels seamless for users while navigating the real safety, latency, and cost tradeoffs behind the scenes.