Oh, hey there! -George Kittle

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About Me

Hello! My name is Kathir and I'm an engineer at Stripe. I spent my entire life in the Bay Area until I went to college in Los Angeles, and I'm currently living in Seattle. If COVID-19 did one good thing for me, it was giving me so much free time to the point that I decided to build this website from scratch; I hope you enjoy!

I started my career entirely focused on cloud computing and distributed systems, working on a team in SharePoint Online that was focused on building world class compute capacity management for SharePoint's massive amount of customer traffic. After a few years, I decided to make the move to Stripe, where I currently work on edge infrastructure. On top of that, living in Seattle has been the best move for my life that I never expected. The city works for my personality and I truly fit in here!

Outside of work, my favorite activities include hiking, watching movies, reading, weightlifting, photography, and playing/watching sports. I'm obsessed with the outdoors; I'm always looking for the next adventure. My strongest belief in life is that if I have a finite amount of time on this planet, I have no reason to not explore every inch of it that I possibly can before my time is up. And I plan to do exactly that.

Stripe Microsoft Workato Avi Networks BlackBox Trading Bruin Sports Analytics

Stripe

Software Engineer • 2025-Present

Stripe is an online payments infrastructure company whose goal is to increase the GDP of the internet. I got onboard to build a secure and fast edge infrastructure to connect Stripe's products to our users worldwide while shielding our services from the complexity of the internet. Stripe is as much a financial services company as it is a traditional software company, and I've learned a lot of new things in this sphere.

Microsoft

Software Engineer • 2021-2025

I returned to the same team that I interned with. My general focus was on improving capacity management and service reliability for SharePoint Online.

Software Engineer Intern • Summer 2020

I worked remotely with a team within SharePoint Online whose main focus was capacity management and disaster recovery.

Workato

Software Engineer Intern • Summer 2019

Workato is an integration automation company that is on the rise, and I was able to sneak into an internship there while they were still relatively young. Key accomplishments/takeaways:

Primarily helped integrate AWS Simple Notification Service into Workato platform
Played pivotal role in transporting boxes as we moved from old office in Cupertino to new one in Mountain View

Avi Networks

Software Engineer Intern • Summer 2018

Avi Networks is a multi-cloud application delivery company that was acquired by VMware just a year after I worked there. Key accomplishments/takeaways:

First ever internship, in terms of sheer learning the steepest learning curve
Primarily wrote a testing library, a relatively unimpactful project compared to the next two internships considering lack of experience at the time

Bruin Sports Analytics

President • 2020-2021

I capped off my journey by serving as President of the club, managing all of our operations and teams.

Journalism Chair • 2019-2020

In my 3rd year I took a leadership role and managed the production of our quarterly articles.

Data Journalist • 2017-2019

This club was founded during my first year of college. I spent the first two years writing articles that used data science to investigate contemporary sports topics.

BlackBox Trading, LLC

Strategy Development • 2018-2021

BlackBox is a project I worked on for 2 years. Our team creates systematic trading strategies based on statistical factors and deploys these strategies to trade on the stock market. I was approached during my 2nd year of college by a few high school classmates and we worked on it until we graduated. Key accomplishments/takeaways:

Gained exposure to subjects (finance & trading) that I had little experience with
Opportunity to stay connected with old friends and meet new people

Modern NFL Receiver Analysis

This project looks at advanced NFL receiver data and performs a Principal Component Analysis and K-means Clustering to create a model that classifies the receivers into various groups based on their numbers. My idea was to be able to use this to better understand the tiers of modern receivers in the NFL and how they differ from the traditional roles that have been around for years.

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DVOA Analysis

Defense-adjusted Value Over Average is a football efficiency metric that compares the situational success of a given play to league-average results in that situation. This project scrapes DVOA data from the 1985 NFL season to the most recent season and creates a regression model that predicts the number of regular season games a team will win based on its team DVOA numbers.

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ATP Tour Analysis

This article looks at the structure of the men's professional tennis circuit and takes a statistical approach to determine the what it takes to become the World Number 1 tennis player. With my buddy Kevin, I analyze the careers of the Big 3, their tendencies in tournament scheduling, and how they have optimized their ATP rankings through efficient planning and performance. We then use this information to assess the tennis landscape and what ultimately is required to be the best tennis player on Earth.

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