Ken Farmer
Principal Software Engineer at Zscaler
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKen Farmer is a Principal Software Engineer and data architect with 14+ years building high-scale analytical platforms, particularly in network and security-focused environments. He currently designs a threat-hunting lakehouse at Zscaler and has repeatedly driven down costs and complexity—most notably cutting Snowflake spend by over 50% while rolling out dbt-driven ownership and metadata for Alto Pharmacy. Ken blends hands-on engineering with people leadership, fostering teams that ship event-driven, CI/CD-enabled pipelines, data contracts, and runtime quality checks. His background spans startups and enterprise (from ProtectWise and RedCanary to Splunk and IBM), where he has built creative, cost-efficient solutions for massive telemetry volumes. Colleagues rely on him to balance sustainable architecture with incremental business value and measurable SLIs. Based in Boulder, he pairs a pragmatic engineering style with a curiosity for tooling and automation that often surfaces as internal libraries and validation frameworks.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
University of Maryland
Stackoverflow
1,610reputation
286kreached
30answers
14questions
database-design
top-5%
Github Skills (27)
database-design9
data-analysis9
aws7
left-join6
database6
sql-server6
decorators6
sql6
db26
star-schema6
data-warehouse6
terraform6
terraform-provider6
analytics6
runtime-type6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
willzfarmer/hadoopinspector_plugins
Sep 2015 - Aug 2017
Contributions:12 PRs, 14 pushes, 11 branches in 1 year 11 months
hadoopjavainspector
kenfar/dotfiles
Apr 2015 - Feb 2023
Contributions:14 pushes, 3 branches in 7 years 11 months
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