Steve Kinney

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Steve Kinney

Hi, I’m Steve.

I’m a software engineer, educator, and engineering leader based in Denver. Most recently, I spent a year as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Redpoint, where I focused on building agentic workflows and tools. That work included a durable agent execution workflow platform, an IndexedDB-based vector database that runs in the browser, a robust agent tool management platform, and an agent runtime embedded in a Chrome extension.

Before that, I led the Developer Tools team at Temporal. I was one of the early employees, built the open source Temporal UI and Temporal Cloud UI from the ground up, and then built the team responsible for them. For a stretch, that team also owned the CLI and the Visual Studio Code extension, which meant thinking about the entire developer workflow, not just the interface layer.

Earlier in my career, I was the very first Front-End Architect™ at Twilio and SendGrid. Those roles taught me how to build consensus across large organizations, drive architecture through influence, and help teams make good technical decisions at scale.

I still care deeply about front-end architecture, but my work has never really been just frontend. The common thread through all of it is making complicated systems usable: distributed systems, developer platforms, and now AI systems. I tend to live at the intersection of product thinking, technical architecture, and developer experience.

That also shows up in my writing. Lately, I’ve been researching and publishing on agent loops, memory systems for AI agents, AI gateways and durable workflow systems, prompt engineering across the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini APIs in this post, MCP Apps and AI tooling, and what it takes to run untrusted code safely.

Today, I’m an instructor at Frontend Masters, where I teach courses including Open Source AI with Python & Hugging Face and Cursor & Claude Code: Professional AI Setup. I also founded the Front-End Engineering program at Turing School.

I actually started my career in public education. I was an NYC public school teacher in high-need schools across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I technically had my principal’s license, but I never ended up using it.

I’ve co-founded DinosaurJS, a JavaScript conference in Denver, spoken at events like JSConf and RailsConf, and authored ”Electron in Action“—though technology moves faster than books, so consider that a historical artifact at this point.

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I am lucky enough to teach a bunch of courses with my friends at Frontend Masters. We've been working together since 2016. Before I was a teacher, I was a customer back when I was learning the ropes. I can't recommend them highly enough. You can find the most up-to-date list here.