Kenny Mroz

I'm a Technical Architect in Infrastructure Platform Engineering at Grainger, where I work with platform engineering teams to build and scale internal developer products. I joined Grainger in 2019, left in 2021 to take on roles at HashiCorp and Amazon, and came back in 2023. The time away was valuable. Consulting on Amazon's professional services team taught me a lot. But what brought me back was simpler than that. I missed building toward one goal with one team.

A few months ago I moved into an architecture role, and I'll be honest, I'm still figuring out what that means. For most of my career I was the one building the solutions. Now I'm the person in the room from the beginning, helping shape what gets built before anyone writes a line of code. The hardest part isn't the technical side. It's getting people and teams aligned, which turns out to be a completely different skill set than I expected.

On the side, I teach at DePaul University. I've taught Intro to Cloud Computing, and I currently teach Intro to Databases and Intro to Containers. Teaching keeps me honest. You can't fake understanding when a student asks you to explain something from scratch.

Outside of work I'm a husband and dad to two daughters, ages 4 and 6. I'm from Chicago, which means I bleed Bears and Bulls. Da Bears, always. Whatever free time I have left goes to golf or video games. Console only, no exceptions.

People who know me well would probably describe me as loyal, caring, and passionate. I think that's right.

You can find me on LinkedIn.