An innovative, strategic, hands-on technical and people leader with a record of building high-performing teams to address new technologies, new markets, delivering on revenue opportunities quickly.

Contact

Summary

An experienced, technical leader of high profile, high-performing product, research, and shared technology engineering organizations. Have lead product engineering on global consumer and professional software brands as well as B2B, B2B2C, and marketplace companies. Pioneered the use of new technologies and development methodologies within organizations, and evangelized them successfully to senior management and other engineering teams. Routinely receive excellent reviews for leadership and customer focus. Am often invited to speak about building strong engineering teams at conferences internationally. Technical areas of expertise include service scalability, user experience, consumer product development, streaming media, machine learning (ML) and AI-driven product features, microservices, desktop, mobile, web, and connected architectures, image, audio, and video processing, domain-specific languages and graphics. Have extensive experience building products using Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming methodologies.

Experience

  • Chief Technology Officer
    December 2022 - present
    DistroKid
    New York, NY (remote)
    DistroKid is the leading platform for independent musicians to distribute their music. I oversee the technical vision, strategy, and execution of the company, ensuring the scalability, reliability, and security of our services and products. I am responsible for the engineering, data analytics, data science, IT, and infrastructure teams for the company.
  • Founder/Principal
    July 2020 - present
    Nimble Autonomy, LLC
    Mercer Island, WA
    Formed a consultancy to structure and professionalize my occasional consulting and professional writing and speaking work. Supporting growing technology companies and their leadership to scale healthily and sustainably.
  • Member, Board of Directors
    December 2021 - December 2022
    Pickatale
    Oslo, Norway
    Oversaw and supported the company and executive team
  • Chief Technology Officer
    October 2020 - November 2022
    Anaconda
    Austin, TX (remote)
    During my tenure at Anaconda: the company had seven consecutive quarters of record revenue growth; we raised a substantial funding round; we launched the company's first SAAS platform and products; we launched the open-source PyScript web development framework; I brought the Pyston and Beeware open-source projects under the company's umbrella; I helped to negotiate new partnerships with Snowflake, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle; and I lead the company's first acquisition. To support these efforts, I grew the engineering organization from 46 to 145, substantially expanding the footprint outside the USA and adding new technical disciplines to the company. I drove dramatic improvements to the company's platform and infrastructure, including creating data platform and security teams, and made substantial efficiency improvements to both product engineering as well as build engineering for the company's open source python distribution used by 30 million practioners.
  • Chief Technology Officer
    April 2019 - June 2020
    Onfido
    London, UK
    Responsible for the 160-plus person Technology Organization, including Engineering, Research, Security, Business Intelligence, IT, and Product Support. The team is in London, Lisbon, Albuquerque, and remote. During my time at Onfido, I drove the company's first acquisition, we achieved our first SOC2 certification and recertified on ISO 27001. We completed a $100M raise with a process of extensive technical due diligence. Our revenue grew by over 130% during this time. I grew the technology organization by over 50% during my tenure while significantly improving the percentage of underrepresented groups. We signed our first significant global enterprise customers and partnerships with the world’s largest IAM providers. We launched new production environments in the US and Canada to support data-locality for our customers. While we continued to improve our core product offering, I helped to shepherd several innovation projects, including partnering with the UK ICO's sandbox project on next-generation identity and privacy solutions. Onfido won multiple awards for our algorithm bias mitigation and accessibility work during my tenure.
  • Member, Board of Advisors
    June 2018 - present
    CavnessHR
    Dupont, WA
    Support and advise the founder on technical execution and business development.
  • Advisor
    April 2019 - December 2019
    AstrumU
    Kirkland, WA
    Moved to an advisor role after leaving the company as a full-time employee.
  • Member, Board of Advisors
    November 2016 - April 2019
    Dolly
    Seattle, WA
    Supported and advised executive team on software development, scalability, hiring, and technical decisions.
  • VP Engineering
    June 2018 - March 2019
    AstrumU
    Kirkland, WA
    Hired initial development team in US and remote. Responsible for initial microservice software architecture using Kubernetes and Istio. Released iniital B2B and B2C application MVPs to the market.
  • Strategic Advisor
    January 2016 - January 2019
    Godel Technologies
    Manchester, UK
    Assisted Godel's CEO and it's clients to build high-performing teams with a strong culture as they scale significantly.
  • Chief Technology Officer
    June 2016 - April 2018
    Avvo
    Seattle, WA
    Responsible for leading the software development, test, data engineering, data science, dev-ops and IT functions. Grew the organization from 51 to 77 people while significantly improving diversity, productivity, development processes and morale. Evolved software and data architecture. Profit increased consistently across my entire tenure at Avvo leading to a successful exit via acquisition by Internet Brands in February 2018.
  • Vice-President of Engineering, Consumer
    May 2013 - June 2016
    Spotify
    Stockholm, Sweden
    Engineering leader for the 176-person consumer engineering organization, three tribes consisting of nineteen squads in Stockholm and Göteborg, Sweden and New York City, USA; including engineering, test, data engineering, and agile coaches. My team was responsible for all of the features in the Spotify product on the primary platforms, and for the media path from ingestion to storage, streaming, and playback. Each of the teams was responsible for their full stack (from services to client UI) for Spotify's mobile, desktop and web platforms. Was accountable for both significant step-change product innovation efforts and continuing high-velocity incremental innovation, helping Spotify grow several hundred percent in active and paying users.
  • Director of Engineering
    April 2004 - May 2013
    Adobe
    Seattle, WA

    Managed a thirty-eight person organization focused on building the Adobe Revel mobile, desktop, and web clients; as well as developing a shared client, cloud and imaging architecture to be used across all of Adobe's mainstream products based on the design the team created for the Adobe Carousel (renamed Adobe Revel) product. Direct reports were senior engineering, operations, and quality engineering managers as well as product architects. Lead the effort to take the product from its initial prototypes to a full commercial version on the iOS and OS X operating systems while building out the engineering and quality engineering teams. From prototype to 1.0 launch was less than eight months. The product was downloaded over four million times in its first two months of release and remained in the top 10 photography apps during tenure on the product. From Revel’s launch until departure, the product grew from managing zero to 300 million user assets, and from zero to 4.5 million user accounts. Responsible for the 1.0 1.1, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 releases.

    From 2005 until 2011, managed the Adobe Image Foundation group: fourteen senior development and quality engineers creating the Pixel Bender image and video processing language and its CPU and GPU runtime for use in Adobe Products. One of the principal Adobe engineering representatives with ISVs, IHVs and standards bodies in areas of high-performance computing, GPUs, and Multi-core development. Additionally, was the primary developer of the Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE application that shipped with the Creative Suite. AIF technology shipped in After Effects CS3/4/5, Photoshop CS4/5, Premiere CS4/5, Flash Pro CS4/5, Flash Player 10 and all other Adobe imaging and video products. The increased performance from the GPU and multi-core acceleration was an oft-cited major selling point for Adobe’s applications in reviews and customer feedback.

    From 2004 to 2005, was the Project Lead and Architect in the Innovative Technologies for Emerging Markets team. Worked with Photoshop Elements team to transition nascent technology to create the Adobe Help Center, a new help system. Shipped with Photoshop Elements (version 3, 4 and 5), Premiere Elements (Version 2 and 3), Creative Suite CS2 (and all associated applications), and the Digital Video Suite 2005 (including all associated applications).

  • Software Design Engineer
    December 2002 - April 2004
    Microsoft
    Redmond, WA
    Member of the Windows CE Core OS team; responsible for half of the Windows CE standard shell UI APIs shipped in Windows CE 4.2 and 5.0. For version 5.0, wholly re-architected and did the majority of the implementation work for the build system in the WindowsCE Platform Builder IDE tool. Overcame significant political resistance from Program Management and Quality Engineering organizations by creating a small tiger team that adopted an agile-based approach to developing the new system quickly and with high code coverage from automated unit tests. The new build system was an unqualified success with Microsoft’s embedded IHV partners.
  • Software Developer, Level 4
    June 2002 - December 2002
    Volt Technologies
    Redmond, WA
    Consultant to Microsoft's Windows CE.NET team. Ported the Pocket Excel application to Windows CE 4.2, and created a standard shell library to unify the API for the many versions of the Windows CE shell.
  • Director of Engineering
    June 2001 - June 2002
    Agnostic Media
    Seattle, WA
    Designed the architecture and did the server-side implementation of an automated media encoding and digital asset management application directed at companies with large media libraries. Also met with potential investors, hardware and software partners.
  • Development Lead
    July 2000 - March 2001
    Bootleg Networks
    Seattle, WA
    Managed a team using Extreme Programming methodologies to develop a world-class media management, archiving, and productizing solution. Additionally, was responsible for meeting with angel investors, venture capital partners, potential customers, hardware, and software partners. Hired all members of the development organization and directly contributed to the development of the product.
  • Software Design Engineer
    September 1994 - July 2000
    Microsoft
    Redmond, WA

    Developer with the Windows Media version 7.0 Encoder application team in the Digital Media Division from August 1999 to July 2000. Designed and implemented significant pieces of the application. This release was pivotal in Microsoft taking a leadership position in streaming media.

    From September 1994 until August 1999, was a development lead in the Virtual Worlds Group of Microsoft Research. The goal of the project was to define the future of multi-user online virtual environments. The first shipping version of the project was called V-Chat, which shipped as part of MSN. Created initial prototypes of V-Chat; designed significant parts of the software architecture, and wrote production code for audio support and 3D graphics architecture. Lead development on the V-Chat authoring system shipped to all content developers. Following V-Chat, lead a Development group of four to create a next-generation authoring tool for virtual environments. That work shipped in the Microsoft Virtual Worlds Platform v1.0, v1.1, v1.5 and v2.0 releases.

  • Research and Development Staff
    April 1994 - September 1994
    (Colossal) Pictures
    San Francisco, CA
    Developed a Renderman interface for the Alive performance animation system used for Cartoon Network's "Moxy's Pirate Television Show". Developed production tools for (C)P animators using softImage and Ark. Acted as a technical consultant for the Squeezels networked VR game for the Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation launch.
  • Member of Technical Staff
    June 1992 - April 1994
    Silicon Graphics, Incorporated
    Mountain View, CA
    Initiated and executed several projects. Gallery, a virtual reality Art Gallery for the Reality Engine Computer, developed with a team of three other people; Trainer, a multimedia computer-based training station for the United Airlines maintenance base, created with consultation from the United Airlines technology groups. Lead developer on The Out Of Box Experience, a joint project between Silicon Graphics and (Colossal) Pictures shipped as part of every SGI Indy system, including developers from both companies. 3D Annotator, a prototype product that allows users to attach audio, video clips, images and text to 3D objects, later developed into the IRIS Annotator product.
  • Programmer
    May 1991 - May 1992
    IBM Information Technology Center
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Built an editing system for the TACTUS multimedia toolkit. Acknowledged in Tactus: toolkit-level support for synchronized interactive multimedia (Dannenberg, Nuendorffer, Newcomer, Rubine, Anderson), Multimedia Systems, Springer-Verlag, 1993
  • Programmer
    January 1990 - October 1990
    Center For Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Developed a graphical interface and command-language interpreter in Common Lisp for the CDART military scheduler project.

Patents

  • Facilitating Access to Content in a Content-aware Mesh
    #20140056530
    co-author
    filed: August 22, 2012
    granted: February 27, 2014
    Facilitating access to content in a content-aware mesh may include a coordinating node storing information associated with each image of a plurality of images. The images may be distributed among at least two nodes of the mesh. The coordinating node may provide access to each image to a node of the mesh. Providing access may be performed without transmitting all of the images to the node. The node may be configured to display an image of the plurality of images via a uniform interface without indication as to which of the at least two nodes the image is stored on.
  • Accessing Content in a Content-aware Mesh
    #20140055474
    co-author
    filed: August 22, 2012
    granted: February 27, 2014
    Content in a content-aware mesh may be accessed and/or manipulated. In one embodiment, a node may receive access to each of a plurality of images that are distributed among at least two nodes of a mesh. The at least two nodes may not be part of the same service. Accessing to each of the images may be performed without the node locally storing all of the images. The node may display an image of the plurality of images via a uniform interface without indication as to which of the nodes the image is stored on.
  • System And Method For Executing Multiple Functions Execution By Generating Multiple Execution Graphs Using Determined Available Resources, Selecting One Of The Multiple Execution Graphs Based On Estimated Cost And Compiling The Selected Execution Graph
    #8549529
    co-author
    filed: May 29, 2009
    granted: October 01, 2013
    Various embodiments herein provide one or more systems, methods, software, and data structures for executing multiple functions using more than one resource within a computing system. Examples of functions comprise data processing filters and effects. Resources include, for example, a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU). Based on an input graph received from a user, one or more execution graphs may be generated to indicate the resources to be used and data conversions to be performed.
  • Hierarchical In-place Menus
    #7418670
    sole author
    filed: October 03, 2003
    granted: August 26, 2008
    A hierarchical menu system displays submenus in place of parent menus, and vice versa, when appropriate menu items are selected from within parent menus and submenus. Parent menu items selected from within parent menus are displayed within submenus as links back to previous parent menus. Benefits of the disclosed hierarchical menu system include the ability to implement a hierarchical menu on devices having varying screen sizes, including small-screen devices, while maintaining a history of previously selected menu items that enable a user to navigate within the hierarchical menu to any previously displayed menu.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Bachelor of Science Degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, graduated May 1992. Course work focused on Computer Graphics, Software Engineering, Computer and Electronic Music and New Media Arts

Interviews

Invited Keynotes

Complete list of talks is at https://kevingoldsmith.com/talks

Publishing Credits

  • It Depends: Writing on Technology Leadership 2012-2022, Unit Circle Press: "a collection of essays and articles by technology executive Kevin Goldsmith, is a must-read for current or aspiring engineering managers, directors, and senior technology executives. With over thirty years of experience in leadership roles at industry-leading technology companies like IBM, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Adobe, as well as early-stage startups and unicorns like Spotify, Avvo, Anaconda, and DistroKid, Goldsmith shares his knowledge about leading technology teams and larger organizations in this book."
  • Multiple Articles, Adobe Developer Network: Authored several articles between January 2010 and March 2011 on using the Pixel Bender image processing language.
  • Webworks: e-zines: Explore On-Line Magazine Design, Martha Gill - Rockport Publishers, 2000: Unit Circle E-Zine featured showcasing my web design
  • Inventor Mentor, Release 1, Josie Wernecke - Addison Wesley, 1994: color plates 27, 30, 37-40
  • 1994 Catalog, Center for Creative Imaging: my images used to promote the courses
  • Open GL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Release 1, Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, Dave Shreiner - Addison Wesley, 1993: color plate 24

Production Credits

  • Moxy's Pirate Television Show, 1994-1995 Season, Cartoon Network. Developed software animation tools used in the production

Honors

  • Adobe Technology Summit 2011: Program Committee Member and Software Engineering Track Chair, Invited to take a leadership position for a company-wide internal Adobe technical conference with over 2000 attendees.
  • Siggraph 1995: Featured in Computer Animation Festival / Electronic Theater, Excepts from "Moxy's Pirate Television Show".