---
type: Person
title: Dana Kessler
description: Platform engineer who applied for Larkspur's Senior Platform Engineer
  role in March 2026.
resource: raw/application-cover-letter.md
tags:
- larkspur
- job-application
- platform-engineering
- data-infrastructure
timestamp: '2026-07-16T14:43:22Z'
citadel_version: 0.3.0
---

Dana Kessler is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and can be reached at
dana.kessler@example.com.[^s1][^s7] Her CV headlines her as a "Senior / Staff Platform
Engineer."[^s7]

In March 2026, Kessler applied for the Senior Platform Engineer role at
[Larkspur](../organizations/larkspur.md).[^s2]

## Career

Kessler's cover letter states she has spent roughly the last decade building "the unglamorous
plumbing that keeps data systems honest: ingestion pipelines, storage layers, the queues nobody
thinks about until they break."[^s3]

The letter states that, as of March 2026, Kessler had spent the last four years as a Staff
Engineer at Halcyon Cloud, where she owned the event ingestion path, cut end-to-end processing
latency by more than half, and led the migration of the streaming layer onto Kafka.[^s4] Before
that, she says she spent four years at Cobalt Systems, where she rebuilt a batch pipeline into a
streaming one that she says a good chunk of the company still runs on today.[^s4] All told, she
describes this as "the better part of eleven years" of this kind of infrastructure work.[^s4]

Kessler's CV corroborates this account and adds detail: it describes about 11 years of backend
and platform engineering experience across data ingestion, storage, and streaming
infrastructure, states she is "comfortable owning a system end to end — from the queue to the
query," and says she is looking for a senior platform role at a small, product-focused
team.[^s8]

The CV gives a dated employment history:

- **Staff Engineer, Halcyon Cloud (Amsterdam), 2022–2026** — owned the event ingestion path for
  the platform's analytics product, cut end-to-end event processing latency by more than 50%,
  and led the migration of the streaming layer onto Kafka, mentoring two engineers through
  it.[^s9]
- **Senior Software Engineer, Cobalt Systems (Berlin), 2018–2022** — rebuilt a nightly batch
  pipeline into a continuous streaming pipeline still in production today, introduced
  backpressure handling that eliminated a recurring class of overnight outages, and was on-call
  lead for the data platform for two years.[^s10]
- **Backend Engineer, Meridian Logistics (Rotterdam), 2015–2018** — built and maintained internal
  APIs for the logistics tracking system, and was the first engineer to introduce automated
  integration testing to the backend team.[^s11]

Her CV lists a BSc in Computer Science from TU Delft (2015)[^s12] and skills in Python, Go,
Kafka, and Kubernetes.[^s13]

## Why Larkspur

Kessler's letter says what draws her to Larkspur specifically is that it seems to care about the
same "boring-but-critical" engineering concerns she does, applied to "a much sharper product."[^s3]
She says she has been following [Skylight](../systems/skylight.md) for a while, and that its
recent sub-second refresh work "genuinely impressed" her — calling a live analytics dashboard
refreshing in under a second without melting the backend "not a marketing line," since she says
she knows exactly how hard that is.[^s3]

She says she wants to do that kind of work somewhere "small enough that it matters," on a product
she'd actually use, and states Larkspur fits on both counts.[^s5]

## Style profile

- **Wry, self-deprecating opener.** "I'll be honest — I don't usually get excited about job
  postings, but this one made me stop scrolling."[^s2]
- **Understated framing of her own accomplishments.** "A couple of quick highlights from my
  side."[^s4]
- **Plainspoken, metaphor-driven description of her work.** "I like being the person who makes the
  fast path fast and the slow path disappear."[^s4]
- **Informal, warm sign-off.** Closes with "Thanks for reading this far." and signs off
  "Warmly,".[^s6]

## See also

- [Larkspur](../organizations/larkspur.md)
- [Skylight](../systems/skylight.md)

## Sources

[^s1]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), lines 1-3 — letterhead contact details (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s2]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), line 9 — applying for the Senior Platform Engineer role (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s3]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), line 11 — career overview and interest in Larkspur/Skylight (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s4]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), line 13 — Halcyon Cloud / Cobalt Systems highlights (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s5]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), line 15 — motivation for a small, product-focused team (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s6]: [raw/application-cover-letter.md](../../raw/application-cover-letter.md), lines 19-22 — closing lines and signature (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s7]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), lines 1-4 — CV letterhead: title, location, email (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s8]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), lines 10-12 — CV summary (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s9]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), lines 18-23 — Halcyon Cloud entry (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s10]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), lines 25-30 — Cobalt Systems entry (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s11]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), lines 32-36 — Meridian Logistics entry (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s12]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), line 42 — education (ingested 2026-07-14)
[^s13]: [raw/cv.md](../../raw/cv.md), line 48 — skills list (ingested 2026-07-14)
