Kenneth Skovhus

My passion is crafting quality software together with talented people.

With two decades of industry experience and an M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, I combine technical excellence, strong leadership abilities, and a deep empathy for end-users to effectively build impactful products.

I thrive in full-stack development using web technologies like TypeScript, node.js, React, and GraphQL.

Read more about my engineering principles.

Work experience

Product Engineer | Linear (2023-present)

Linear is a better way to build software. What started as a simple issue tracker, has since evolved into a powerful project and issue tracking system that streamlines workflows across the entire product development process. We don't think of Linear as just a better "tool", but as a better "way" to build software.

Staff Engineer | Pleo (2021-2023)

Pleo is the spending solution for forward-thinking teams everywhere. The smart company cards empower thousands of businesses across Europe.

I was part of founding Web Core, a team dedicated to push the Pleo frontend platform forward as part of the Engineering Productivity domain. We radically improved the overall developer experience, mono-repo tooling, CI/CD pipelines, codebase quality, and client-server communication through various cross team initiatives.

Head of Engineering | Electricity Maps (2020-2021)

As head of Engineering for Electricity Maps I worked on finding scalable digital solutions to climate change. After experimenting with B2C carbon accounting app (North) and a B2B carbon accounting SaaS (Bloom), we decided to focus our efforts on Electricity Maps. Read more about our journey.

Electricity Maps organises the world's electricity data to drive the transition towards a truly decarbonised electricity system.

Key responsibilities included working closely with leadership on product strategy, building a world-class engineering team, establishing technical best practices, and driving the development of features across our product portfolio.

Technologies: Python, Dataflow, Google Cloud Services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, node.js, hasura.io

Lead full-stack engineer | LEO Innovation Lab (2017-2020)

As an independent innovation unit, established by LEO Pharma, LEO Innovation Lab develops apps, digital platforms, and other initiatives to support people with chronic skin conditions.

• Technical team lead in various cross-functional teams, always in close collaboration with UX, designers, product, and our machine learnings engineers
• Developing multiple React Native mobile apps and various web-based applications for skin monitoring and diagnosis (see getimagine.io and my blog post or meetup talk about React Native)
• Developing machine learning tools for labeling datasets
• Automation and safety net creation to enable teams to ship features with confidence
• Initiating cross-functional meetups, guild setup for knowledge sharing, work on guidelines, and cross-team coordination.

Technologies: React, React Native, JavaScript, TypeScript, GraphQL, node.js, and a bit of Kotlin, Swift, Scala.

Senior full-stack developer | issuu.com (2012-2016)

issuu.com is a digital publishing platform. It is an archive, library and newsstand all gathered in one reading experience with 50+ million publications and 100 million monthly unique visitors.

During my four years, I worked on everything from publisher tools, upload flow, PDF conversion pipeline, email services, payment service, our first Docker setup, introducing automated tests, front-end architecture (see this blog post or this conference talk), build systems, to several iterations of our design system.

From 2015 I had the pleasure to lead an awesome cross-functional delivery team. As a team lead, I love to enable people to grow, preach continuous delivery, find the right solution to validate a hypothesis, and I strive to shorten the build-measure-learn cycle.

Technologies: Python, JavaScript, React, Backbone.js, node.js, MySQL, AMQP, AWS, Docker, and a bit of Erlang and OCaml.

Software Engineer | Region Hovedstaden (2009-2012)

Worked on the EU project PSIP (Patient Safety through Intelligent Procedures in medication) focusing on data processing, data mining, and development of clinical decision support systems to improve medication safety in hospitals.

Contributions:

• Collaborated with Aalborg, AUTH and Umit university, French hospitals, and commercial partners such as IBM, Medasys, and Oracle.
• Participant and speaker at conferences in France, Italy, and Greece.
• Published a peer-reviewed article "From Adverse Drug Event Detection to Prevention A Novel Clinical Decision Support Framework for Medication Safety" in Methods of Information in Medicine.

Technologies: Java, Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, and fun with XSLT.

Freelancing (2000-2008)

Web development and graphical design. I developed websites, e-commerce sites, desktop applications and designed posters, webdesign, logos, and had a lot of fun with Flash.

Technologies: PHP, .net, Flash, ActionScript, HTML, CSS, SQL.

Education

M.Sc., Technical University of Denmark (2010-2012)

Computer Science and Engineering. Average grade: A+.

Master Thesis: Algorithms for String Comparison on GPUs. Under the supervision of Inge Li Gørtz and Philip Bille (DTU Informatics), we considered parallelization of string comparison algorithms (including sequence alignment, edit distance, and longest common subsequence). We presented a novel approach for solving these problems using graphics processing units (GPUs) and showed a 40X speedup compared to a state-of-the-art sequential CPU solution. Grade: A+.

Courses of special interest:

• Algorithms and Data Structures
• Artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems
• Requirements Engineering.

B.Sc., Technical University of Denmark (2006-2009)

Software Technology. Average grade: A.

Bachelor project: Camera Control and Data Handling on DTUsat-2. Under the supervision of Hans Henrik Løvengreen, we further developed the onboard software on the DTU student satellite, DTUsat-2. The primary focus was on the camera control and data handling. The satellite is still active and in orbit. Grade: A+.