Kevin Pitstick is a senior engineer at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is currently a member of the Tactical and AI-enabled Systems (TAS) initiative, where he is the principal investigator for the “Vessel: Reproducible Container Builds” research project. He has over ten years of software research and development experience in the defense, government, and academic domains. His primary areas of expertise and interest are edge computing, microservice architectures, communication protocols, containerization, and AI/ML at the edge.

Kevin joined the SEI in June 2015 as a member of the Advanced Mobile Systems (AMS) initiative. He's stayed with the initiative through its name changes to the Tactical Technologies Group (TTG) and now the Tactical and AI-enabled Systems (TAS) initiative. His longest work has been with SOCOM's Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF), helping them with edge computing R&D prototyping. He's participated on various Line/LENS projects, such as Video Summarization and Enabling Aerial Object Detection at the Edge. He's also worked with FDA, giving architecture guidance and leading design reviews.

Prior to coming to the SEI, Kevin worked for two years as a Software Engineer II for DRS Technologies in Dayton, OH, on software-defined radios (SDRs) for the DoD. During his time there, he designed and implemented a 50k SLOC Java Swing GUI client for controlling JTT-IBS tactical radios via Ethernet. His other tasks included requirements tracing (DOORS), UML software design (EA), unit/integration test creation and execution, and SDR encryption architecture and design (BitLocker).

As a fresh graduate from the University of Dayton in 2011, Kevin joined the US Air Force as a civilian through the SMART (Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation) program. He worked as a Software Engineer at Robins AFB in Warner Robins, GA, in the 402d Software Maintenance Group. During this time, he worked on OFP (operation flight program) simulation software for the MC130-J and maintained Qt C Linux applications used in the recording and analysis of simulation data files.