About
Kenny Hammerlund
Life is a garden, dig it
I translate business strategy into technical execution, and technical reality back into business outcomes.
Bio
The work between the business and the build
Most of my work is translation. A business goal has to become a plan a team can run. A technical constraint has to become a decision the business can use. I stay in that conversation on purpose.
I do not treat people leadership and individual-contributor craft as a fork you have to pick. I have done both, and each one makes the other better. What matters is knowing where you want to grow. The title can change. The direction should be yours.
The work I keep coming back to is practical: Technology platforms, governance and products that scale, modernization teams can live with, and AI adoption that keeps engineering judgment in the loop.
Strategy
Turning a business goal into a technical plan that a team can actually run.
Platforms
Governed and scalable platforms that multiply value and accelerate business outcomes.
Practical AI
Adoption, integrations, and delivery practices that add speed without giving up judgment.
Contact
Book a time with me
If you want to talk through engineering leadership, a platform decision, or how AI fits the work you already do, pick a time on my calendar.
A working conversation. If it is not a fit, I will say so.
Writing
From the articles
Basic Scaled Agent Designs
A layered architecture for building AI agent systems that scale, with clear separation between user interaction, task execution, and persistent memory.
Archify: Technical Diagrams from Plain English
Create professional architecture, workflow, and sequence diagrams as interactive HTML. Describe your system in chat, get validated diagrams you can trust.
Engineering Team Messaging Format (ETMF)
A standardized format for engineering team project updates. Machine-readable metadata meets human-friendly content.
learn more
A little Deeper
Kenny Hammerlund is technology leader for large organizations. He is a product engineer who scales technology and the teams that build it. His software journey runs from learning to code, to shipping products for real users, to leading enterprise platforms that operate at global scale.
Kenny came to software after a first career in sales and operations. He returned to school after a car crash and graduated in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Starting early and intent on learning how to build the best software possible. He began shipping client work while he was still a student. As an entrepreneur he founded companies that build software for small businesses and public-sector clients.
The early part of his software career was spent in Node.js, React, and GraphQL, almost always on software a specific group of people had to use. In smaller-scale companies, the work was targeted feature development: replacing legacy APIs, building hybrid mobile applications for large member communities and the operators who depended on them, and bringing teams onto modern technology under tight timelines.
Transitioning to software platforms changed the scale and impact of the work. Designing tools and products for large-scale integrations became the focus, from the groundwork of a federated platform the wider organization could adopt to an international graph API built one service at a time. He went on to lead API platforms and now leads AI platforms. As those platforms scaled to billions of interactions a month and billions of dollars in revenue, resilience, site reliability, and operations became a key focus.
He has built many strong engineering teams across the globe and helped start multiple remote technology operation centers. Kenny led these teams through a strong variety of work including cloud migrations, site reliability improvements, technical operation work and a multi-year modernization of a 40-year-old reservation system. His approach on leadership is to clear the road so other people can ship. Supporting the teams is a primary focus and he believes that a high velocity is a byproduct of that support.
He stays hands-on. The through-line is product judgment at platform scale: decide what should exist, know who it is for, and make sure the team and the system can carry it once it is real.