Kenneth Carpenter

Foundation Devices

Cofounder & Chief Technology Officer

Technical leadership and design across embedded systems, operating systems, mobile apps and server architecture.

• KeyOS — Designed and built Foundation's open-source Rust microkernel OS (Xous-based; process isolation, message passing) that powers Passport Prime. Began it on the then-nascent Xous microkernel as the base for an ecosystem built around personal privacy, security and sovereignty. A third-party security audit of the kernel, cryptography, USB, NFC, QuantumLink and PSBT paths was hardened into KeyOS 1.3.
• Passport Prime (GA May 2026) — Shipped Foundation's third-generation device: Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA and secrets vaults, and 50 GB of encrypted storage on one secure processor, with a dedicated Bluetooth coprocessor isolated from it.
• QuantumLink — Led design and implementation of the post-quantum transport between Passport Prime and the Envoy app: ML-KEM encapsulation with AES-256-GCM, Noise XX/IK/KK session establishment, QuantumLink IDs for endpoint identity. The radio only ever carries ciphertext.
• KeyOS SDK — Led the SDK and foundation CLI: Nix-based toolchain, templates, hosted simulator, app signing and sideloading, backed on-device by an Allowed Publishers trust model and per-app permissions; agent-ready docs and skills so AI coding agents can build KeyOS apps. First external developer: Cake Wallet (~1M users).
• Internal AI tooling — Built Foundation's internal AI toolchain: agent orchestration wired into issue tracking and engineering workflows.
• Passport Founder's Edition — Designed and developed the embedded software for a highly secure, Bitcoin-only hardware wallet: device drivers for the secure element chip, a new user interface framework, and Bitcoin features including address verification, transaction signing and multisig account management.
• Passport Gen 2 — Moved the display from monochrome to full color, which meant a completely new UI design and many new features.
• Team building — Ran 100+ technical interviews, hiring only top-tier candidates to give Foundation a solid base for growth.

ServiceNow

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Architectural design and oversight for the Lists, Forms, Controls and Condition Builder teams.

• now-grid — A completely new, extensible grid architecture with plugins that allow very complex customer customizations (JavaScript, Seismic, HTML, CSS).
• Polaris compatibility — Led the investigation into which components and functions had to be ported from the legacy system to the new Seismic-based system.
• Compatibility scanner — Helped design and build a tool that scans script code and customer metadata for functions and components the new system doesn't support.

Obelisk

Principal Software Analyst

Wore many hats at a startup building cryptocurrency mining hardware.

• Mining firmware — Two generations of software for controlling and monitoring custom ASIC mining chips (C, Linux, Buildroot).
• Miner configuration and monitoring UI — Web UI for mining pools, system and network configuration, and mining optimizations (TypeScript, React).
• Customer portal — Customer and order management portal, frontend and backend (TypeScript, React, Redux, Node.js, MariaDB).
• Sales — Also acted as VP of Sales: over $25M in revenue through website sales and over $2M in direct sales.

Hudson River Trading

Algorithm Engineer / Analyst

• Trading data visualization — Designed and built a web-based system for exploring the performance of high-frequency trading algorithms, monitoring profit and loss, and viewing other analytics, including custom visualizations written by algorithm developers (TypeScript, React, Redux, HighCharts, Python).

Arista Networks

Senior Software Engineer — Web · Oct 2014 – Feb 2017

• Network analytics UI — High-level architecture and key features, starting from zero lines of code. Network operators see the state of their network down to individual state changes on each switch, with nanosecond accuracy, and can “go back in time” through the sequence of events to troubleshoot or run post-mortems (JavaScript, React, Redux, Reselect, D3).
• Tap aggregation UI — Designed and built new features for configuring tap aggregation graphically instead of through the CLI. Tap aggregation routes switch traffic between sets of ports by inspecting packet headers rather than by normal MAC-address forwarding (JavaScript, AngularJS).
• Autotest dashboard — Internal tool for monitoring the results of every automated unit and product test, run several times a day: graphs and histograms across device and test types, with drill-down into failing test output. Used to triage bugs and track the health of every project, especially just before release (JavaScript, React, Redux, Reselect, D3).
• Automatic license activation server — Lets switches look up which licenses they're entitled to and retrieve their activation keys (Python, Flask, uWSGI). Co-inventor on the related patent, US 2017/0357784.

Senior Software Engineer — SDN · Jun 2013 – Oct 2014

• New Software Defined Networking features and automated tests in C++ and Python, including the interconnect with VMware's NSX virtualization system.

Schneider Electric

Development Team Lead

Software development and architecture across several major projects.

• Vijeo Design'Air — Architected and built a completely new tablet HMI product for iOS and Android in C# on Xamarin, with 80% of the code shared between the two. Team lead for 10 software engineers, documentation specialists and QA engineers.
• Cloud-based HMI editor — Prototype of a cloud HMI editor in the spirit of Google Slides, saving every change to the server automatically (JavaScript, Node.js, MongoDB).
• CODESYS integration — Integrated the CODESYS soft-PLC library, travelling to the vendor in Kempten, Germany many times to analyze and resolve complex integration issues (C++, some assembly).

Mind Juice Media

Owner / President / Developer

Own company building websites, apps and games for iOS and other platforms.

• Unicorn Rush (iOS) — 2D endless runner: a magical unicorn running across a landscape of floating islands (Objective-C, Pixelwave 2D).
• Charmed (iOS) — Match-3 puzzle game for iPhone and iPod touch, built with Interface Builder, custom list views and UIView animations (Objective-C, UIKit).
• More titles — Flight Deck, Flight Deck: Freedom, Flight Deck: Reloaded, Prime Adventure, Spellchemy, Animal Stickers, CalcXL iPad Calculator, Derpy Dragon.

Electronic Arts

Software Engineer III

Server-side features for EA's sports titles.

• Online backend game server — Components of a next-generation backend shared across EA's online games: chat rooms, statistics, leaderboards, XML weather and news-ticker feeds and more (C++, Windows and Linux).
• Madden NFL 09 Online Leagues — Let groups of up to 32 friends create virtual leagues, draft and trade players, and play each other for a season championship (C++, Windows and Linux, MySQL).

INDE Electronics

Team Lead, Networking Protocols

• Led the team developing and maintaining 20+ communication protocols for INDE's embedded platforms on VxWorks and pSOS (C, C++, Wind River and Green Hills RTOS).
• Serial and Ethernet protocols including Modbus, Modbus Ethernet, Modbus+, Unitelway, XWay, Siemens NITP/TBP and Emerson ROC.
• Day-to-day management of 5+ developers, including twice-yearly career development planning and annual compensation reviews.

Helikon Technologies

Technical Lead & System Architect

First software developer at a startup building software and online games; set up its development guidelines, coding standards and processes.

• PDF rendering engine — Java PDF parsing and rendering engine, much faster than Adobe's Java PDF viewer of the time, plus a skinnable viewer for searching and reading magazine back issues. First product: the Modern Drummer Digital Archive.
• Cosm (MMO game) — Server architecture, database design and scaling; managed the client and server teams, 10+ people (C++, Windows and Linux, MySQL).
• SR&ED and IRAP submissions — Wrote the documentation that won large Canadian government tax credits and grants for the Cosm work, and represented Helikon in the government interviews. Every submission was approved.

DG Systems

Senior Software Engineer

ISDN-based delivery of large audio and video files, mainly for advertising, before the internet was practical for it.

• Waveform editor — 2D graphical editor to trim, loop, and copy and paste sections of audio clips (C++, MFC).
• Audio Analyst — Windows tool for examining and troubleshooting the internals of MPEG audio files; invaluable for tracking down problems with client files (C++, MFC).

Delta Controls

Senior Software Engineer

• Joined straight out of university as a Junior Software Engineer; promoted to Intermediate within a few months and to Senior after a year.
• C and C++ in embedded systems and Windows: network protocols, device drivers, debugging with in-circuit emulators, embedded database development, and visual programming language development.