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KS

Kraig Strong

Senior Engineering Manager, Developer and AI at 1Password

An engineering leader who still ships. I grew 1Password's Developer and AI domain from one team to three and lead its AI-agent security work, and I stay current on the latest build tools by shipping my own iOS and web apps.

At a glance

Developer MAUs at 1Password in 12 months
+300%
engineers in the org I scaled at Rebellion Defense
4 → 30+
code review time at 1Password, from tooling I built
−45%
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Georgia Tech
M.S.

Career

Experience

2024 — Now

1Password

2 yrs 6 mos

Built the Developer and AI domain from a single team into three and set its direction around securing AI-native developers and coding agents, while prototyping the hardest pieces myself.

  1. Senior Engineering Manager, Developer and AIOct 2025 – Present
  2. Engineering Manager, Developer ExperienceApr 2024 – Oct 2025
machine users in 12 months
6×
engineering teams
1 → 3
CI pipeline reliability
+60%
  • Set technical direction and led the teams that shipped 1Password's AI-agent security lineup, including 1Password for Claude, an MCP server for OpenAI Codex, and 1Password Unified Access, launched with partners including Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and GitHub.
  • Grew Developer MAUs by 300% and machine users 6× in 12 months by driving improvements across product, platform, and ecosystems.
  • Personally designed and built a proof of concept for secure, in-memory secret generation and storage for AI agents.
  • Scaled the organization from 1 to 3 engineering teams and defined the strategy and operating model for the Developer and AI domain from inception.
  • Built a Windows proof of concept extending 1Password's Mac-only secure-secrets mounting to Windows, gating in-memory AI-agent secrets per process.
  • Reduced code review time by 45% across the company by building tooling that automatically identifies code owners and triggers review requests.
  • Delivered 1Password's first OAuth-backed API, establishing the foundational authentication layer for internal and external platform adoption.
  • Shaped extensibility strategy across hooks, marketplace, and MCP integrations to enable ecosystem growth.
  • Defined 1Password's developer strategy for the year ahead, centered on securing and enabling AI-native developers and coding agents.
  • Increased CX match accuracy from 20% to 77%, significantly reducing customer support turnaround times.
  • Improved developer productivity at scale by leading company-wide developer experience initiatives and increasing CI pipeline reliability by 60%.
  • Developer platform
  • AI agents
  • MCP
  • OAuth
  • CI / DevEx

2022 — 2024

Rebellion Defense

1 yr 10 mos

Grew engineering from 4 to 30+ and took a pre–product-market-fit defense product from concept to a paying contract, including a cloud-scale simulation platform and a classified deployment.

  1. Director of EngineeringJun 2022 – Feb 2024
  2. Engineering ManagerApr 2022 – Jun 2022
first Mission Engineering contract
$1M+
contract line items delivered, with perfect reviews
100%
  • Led Rebellion's first Mission Engineering initiative from concept to execution, securing a $1M+ contract and unlocking new business opportunities.
  • Scaled the engineering organization from 4 to 30+ engineers, establishing the team structure and execution model to support product-market exploration.
  • Led development of a complex cloud-scale simulation platform built ahead of a strategic contract opportunity, coordinating engineers and subject matter experts in a constrained, pre-product-market-fit environment.
  • Managed development and deployment of a pre-product-market-fit solution in a classified environment, delivering all contract line items to key stakeholders with perfect reviews.
  • Partnered in sales engagements and product demonstrations, contributing directly to increased customer engagement and deal progression.
  • 0 → 1
  • Simulation
  • Classified environments
  • Customer-facing

2016 — 2022

Tripwire

6 yrs

Six years and four roles, from senior and principal engineer to senior engineering manager, owning a product line behind $100M+ in annual revenue.

  1. Senior Engineering Manager2021 – 2022
  2. Engineering Manager2019 – 2021
  3. Principal Software Engineer2019
  4. Senior Software Engineer2016 – 2019
annual revenue supported
$100M+
release cycle
2 wks → <24 h
new platform delivery time
−95%
  • Owned the data acquisition agent supporting $100M+ in annual revenue, ensuring reliability, scalability, and continued product growth.
  • Led the company's most critical 2021 initiative, coordinating execution across 8+ global engineering teams and aligning delivery across product and platform groups.
  • Led a sustaining engineering team that reduced release cycle time from 2 weeks to under 24 hours.
  • Led a migration from static virtual machines to a dynamic environment, reducing new platform delivery time by 95%.
  • Managed customer escalations for the data acquisition agent, achieving >85% customer retention through rapid resolution of Tier 1 issues and strong MTTR.
  • Built a prototype automated asset classification system using decision trees to accurately identify machine use cases.
  • Security
  • Endpoint agents
  • Release engineering
  • Infrastructure

2005 — 2016

Earlier

  • Tektronix 2012–2016

    Software Design Engineer II, Software Quality Engineer

  • Planar Systems 2009–2012

    Manufacturing Test Engineer, Electrical Design Engineering Intern

Education

  • Georgia Tech 2015–2018

    M.S. Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

  • Portland State University 2012–2015

    B.S. equivalent, Computer Science

  • Oregon State University 2005–2010

    B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering

Also

Patent
U.S. Patent 10,585,121: Automating measurements based on waveform patterns
Certifications
Security+, DoD 8570 IAT Level 2
Languages
Go, TypeScript, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, C++, Java

Still shipping

Side projects

I still build. I took each of these from idea to shipped myself (product, code, tests and release), with Claude as my pair.

  • Set the Clock: drag the hands to match 9:15
  • Read the Clock: enter the time an analog clock shows
  • Choose a mode: Explore Time, Set the Clock, Read the Clock, Elapsed Time
  • Crown unlocked after mastering a challenge

Time Tutor

LiveiOS

Clock practice for grades 1–3.

Kids drag real clock hands, read analog clocks, and reason about elapsed time, with calm practice and timed challenges that award stars and crowns.

Under the hood

  • First prototype to a 1.0 release build in four days, then rebuilt as the visual source of truth for the BrightBench suite.
  • Saved stars, streaks and progress have to survive every update; release preflight fails if version numbers drift between package.json, app.json and Xcode.
  • 82 tests across practice, challenge and progress flows.

Math Reef

In App ReviewiOS

Math practice for grades 1–5. Swim into the right answer.

Hold to swim up, let go to sink, and eat the fish carrying the right answer. Five worlds and 64 levels climb from first sums to exponents.

Under the hood

  • Curriculum sequenced by fluency strategy (make 10, doubles, near doubles), with wrong answers that model real slips like a forgotten carry or 4² = 8.
  • An autopilot that plays like a kid drives a fully automated App Store screenshot and preview-video pipeline.
  • Kids-category privacy: no identifiers or timestamps, and a test pins the exact analytics payload keys.

Eat. Dodge. Grow.

Bigger Fish

TestFlight betaiOS

A one-touch arcade game. Eat fast. Stay alive.

Hold to rise, release to fall, eat anything smaller than you. Every other fish is eating too, so skip a risky meal and something else grows into a threat.

Under the hood

  • A meeting planner solves spawns backward, so every designed encounter lands within 0.05 s and 3 pt of its plan.
  • Deterministic 60 Hz simulation with seeded AI; frozen level plans are checked in CI so a shipped level never changes.
  • Balanced with 1,496 recorded playtest runs and bot rollouts. Shares a fish engine with Math Reef, extracted on day two.

Also built

Keepsake

TestFlight betaiOS

A calm recipe app where AI quietly does the cleanup.

Import a recipe from anywhere and Claude normalizes the messy text into structured, plannable data, then gets out of the way.

Under the hood

  • Claude runs server-side only, behind Supabase; the app never holds a model key.
  • Built with a phased rollout plan and adversarial review from a second model.
  • 1,300+ app tests plus pgTAP tests for the database.

BrightBench

LiveWeb + iOS

Focused learning apps on one shared foundation.

The monorepo behind Time Tutor and the next apps in the suite: Expo for products, Next.js for the sites, and a shared design system and audio engine.

Under the hood

  • CI works out which apps a change touches from the dependency graph and builds only those.
  • Analytics store anonymous daily counters only, with every limit enforced atomically in Redis.
  • Agents work from one AGENTS.md, reusable skills and risk-tiered verification, and pricing, child privacy and releases always stop for a human.

Photoframe

Ran for one eventWeb

Event photo frames where the photo never leaves the phone.

Guests scan a QR code, frame a photo under the event overlay and share it. Decoding, cropping and compositing all happen in the browser.

Under the hood

  • No upload, no backend, no account. Exactly seven allowlisted telemetry events, stripped by two independent layers.
  • About one line of test per line of source, plus Playwright end-to-end tests.
  • A test guards the printed QR code's path, because deleting one rewrite would break every printed code.

Practice

How I build

My day job is giving AI agents real power without handing them the keys. My side projects are where I practice what that takes, and what I learn there goes straight back to my teams.

  1. 01

    Agents write code. I own the system.

    Every repo starts with one AGENTS.md: build commands, invariants and boundaries in a single canonical place. Reusable skills cover starting, verifying, reviewing and releasing a change. In Bigger Fish, 192 of the first 331 commits were co-authored with Claude.

  2. 02

    Verification scales with risk.

    Routine UI work gets automated checks. Persistence, native, privacy and release changes need a simulator, a device or a person. Pricing, child privacy and releases always stop for human approval.

  3. 03

    Privacy is a test, not a promise.

    Photoframe allowlists seven telemetry events. Math Reef pins its exact analytics payload in a test. BrightBench's backend stores counters only, bounded atomically so nobody can make it store more.

  4. 04

    Make it deterministic, then measure.

    Seeded simulations, frozen level plans checked in CI, and 1,496 recorded playtests decide what ships in Bigger Fish, not gut feel.

Contact

Get in touch

Email is the best way to reach me. I'm always happy to talk about developer platforms, AI agents, or building engineering teams.

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