Dana Kessler
dana.kessler@example.com
Amsterdam, Netherlands

March 2026

Dear Larkspur Hiring Team,

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Platform Engineer role at Larkspur. I'll be honest — I don't usually get excited about job postings, but this one made me stop scrolling.

I've spent the last decade or so building the unglamorous plumbing that keeps data systems honest: ingestion pipelines, storage layers, the queues nobody thinks about until they break. What draws me to Larkspur specifically is that you seem to care about the same boring-but-critical things I do, just with a much sharper product on top. I've been following Skylight for a while, and the recent sub-second refresh work genuinely impressed me. Getting a live analytics dashboard to refresh in under a second without melting the backend is not a marketing line to me — I know exactly how hard that is, and I'd love to work on problems at that level.

A couple of quick highlights from my side. At Halcyon Cloud I've spent the last four years as a Staff Engineer owning the event ingestion path, where I cut our end-to-end processing latency by more than half and led the migration of our streaming layer onto Kafka. Before that I gave four years to Cobalt Systems, where I rebuilt a batch pipeline into a streaming one that a good chunk of the company still runs on today. All told it's been the better part of eleven years in this kind of plumbing. I like being the person who makes the fast path fast and the slow path disappear.

I'm at a point where I want to do that kind of work somewhere small enough that it matters, on a product I'd actually use. Larkspur fits that on both counts.

My CV is attached with the full timeline and details. I'd welcome the chance to talk about where I could help most on the platform team.

Thanks for reading this far.

Warmly,
Dana Kessler
