Kenneth J. Urban
Technologist, Author, Father, Flight Instructor
Ken has twenty years of experience in the IT industry. He started his career fixing computers at the University of Pittsburgh and held several different positions there. He then did a short stint as a defense contractor writing code on various projects ranging from simple signal deconfliction to complex control systems. Just before joining Atlassian he served ten years in public service as a civil servant within the Intelligence community working to build and maintain one of the largest and most complex multi-tenant Hadoop cloud systems.
Ken has a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a certified flight instructor and serves on the board of the Fort Meade Flying Activity (FMFA).
Early LIfe and Education
Born in the early 1980s (techincally a millenial) to a military family in central Pennsylvania, Ken spent his youth moving around the world. He graduated high school as part of the class of 2000 and remembers the days when the internet was all through phone lines and made "funky noises." Because he is such a nerd/geek/whatever you want to call it he participated in Academic Decathlon (think taking tests for fun) where he won several gold medals and a scholarship to a small PA university.
Ken attended the University of Pittsburgh immediately after graduating high school. He declared his major immediately because he was that confident that computer science was the future. It is a decision that has served him well as he has been very successful in his career in Information Technology. While working at Pitt, Ken also worked for Pitt. He worked in the university computer labs and also worked for the ResNet program fixing student's computers. Ken graduated in 2004 with a BS in CS.
Career in IT
After graduating, Ken took a job working at the University Help Desk where he immediately skewed the team statistics by consistently taking the most calls and having the highest resolution rate. He also built custom software to improve the team workflow. After a few months, he was promoted to managing the IT Department for the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. There he was responsible for the department's computing needs.
Soon after that, Ken was recruited by Northrop Grumman to work in Sierra Vista, Az on tactical data link evaluation software for the Joint Interoperability Test Command. There he became a subject matter expert on several tactical data links and rewrote the testing software. He devised new methods to use managed and unmanaged memory together in the early days of C# and modularized the software. From there, he was recruited to work in Denver on other projects.
Ken's expertise in IT drew the attention of the Intelligence Community and he was recruited to work on a Hadoop platform. There he also setup an Atlassian stack and fundamentally altered how development was done at the agency. Not much can be said about this time except what is on his LinkedIN profile.
Today Ken works at Atlassian managing several solutions engineering teams.
