Peter Snelgrove

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Rapid7 Jan 2023 – Jul 2026

• Stepped back to individual contributor because the organization needed hands-on development more than another director, which happily matched my own desire to code full time. My first job back was rehabilitating an abandoned Go service.
• Performance and cost dominated our focus. We delivered several rounds of 20+% cost reductions by going after database structure and the query antipatterns that had accumulated over the years.
• Cut huge swaths of complexity and waste from our CI/CD pipelines; I hope to never touch Jenkins again. With the performance myths dispelled, I adopted a battery of static analysis tools, type checkers, and structural editing tools, setting the example for 1% daily compounding improvement. Kudos to the team at Astral.
• A small cohort of us then found real uses for LLM agents: selecting, applying, and auditing static analysis rules to land large code-quality improvements.

Python, Go, DuckDB, Database Optimization, CI/CD, CSPM, Static Analysis, LLM Agents

Director of Engineering

Rapid7 May 2020 – Jan 2023

• Led engineering organization for Cloud Security product pillar following acquisition of DivvyCloud.
• Built out my first international engineering team based in Belfast, Ireland.
• Realigned product strategy and deployment patterns for CSPM platform to better fit the Rapid7 customer base and sales pipeline.
• Balanced coverage expansion with addressing foundational technical debt.

Engineering Leadership, Team Building, Product Strategy, CSPM

Software Engineer to Director of Engineering

DivvyCloud May 2015 – May 2020

Acquired by Rapid7 in 2020

• Joined as employee #6 to write Python. By week two I was learning JavaScript instead, and shipped the first major overhaul of the frontend that summer. The early years were rapid growth and stepping in wherever the stack needed me.
• Designed and delivered many of the core abstractions for security analysis, compliance content, and automated remediation, in close collaboration with our Fortune 500 customers. Together we grew from a better ‘single pane of glass’ console into a security and compliance platform.
• Behind the scenes I owned harvesting and background job scheduling, having rewritten the system after the CTO left and it stopped scaling with no one who understood it. Age-of-information problems have stuck with me since; what-for is the distillation of my experience failing upwards.
• We reached $22MM ARR and roughly 120 people before Rapid7 acquired us for $145MM. I had drifted into training and managing the engineering team; in my last year I was co-Director of Engineering and a core part of due diligence.

Python, JavaScript, CSPM, AWS, Azure, GCP, Job Scheduling

Founder & CEO

Knollgrass Inc. Sep 2013 – May 2015

Bootstrapped SaaS scheduling platform, raised accelerator funds, had a good run, and closed on VC misalignment.

Interpreting Agency Serving Central Alabama

Snelgrove & Associates LLC Jul 2010 – Aug 2013

what-for

Data Sovereignty for Cloud Security

Harvest your public cloud infrastructure on a cadence that adapts to the real rate of change in your environments, land it in a DuckDB database for ad-hoc analytical work, and warehouse every change into a DuckLake catalog for change and historical analysis.

spoken-for

Self Sovereign Interpreter Scheduling

Local-first interpreting agency in your pocket. Take full advantage of native iOS/Android platform APIs to minimize dependence on costly hosted services, e.g., map routing, local LLMs, etc. Rust core for application and peer-to-peer networking with an architecture constrained specifically for deterministic simulation testing.

NixOS

Foolish enough to run my own router

• My router project explores the idea that declaratively configuring nftables, OS flags, and network interfaces without the indirection of a generic form-builder UI is more secure and easier to independently verify.
• I take the same approach with other scripts and services where I prioritize solving the specific problem rather than spending my time configuring “off the shelf” services. Within reason, of course.

Bachelor of Science, ASL & English Interpretation

Eastern Kentucky University