About

Stephen Kiers and family

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: 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 it's an 80-year-old house, woodworking, electronics, and 3D printing with my son. The things I've built, and what I learned building them, are on the projects page.

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

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

* books enjoyed with my 10 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.