Chris Kenst The intersection of AI, Testing and Quality | Shattered Illusions +

Developer Relations

Manybrain LLC

Oct 2025 - Current (9 months)

Director of Technology Services

STELLA Automotive AI

Mar 2025 - Aug 2025 (6 months)

• Owned legacy reporting systems, technical operations and quality teams • Included the data annotation process and tier-3 support for explainability (xAi) requests • Included the quality processes for internal and contractor development • Lead testing effort company wide during re-platform of STELLA from ML to GenAI systems • Briefly filled in for CTO in all leadership aspects during re-platform • Technical member of staff on customer calls

Director of Quality Assurance

STELLA Automotive AI

Jul 2023 - Mar 2025 (1 year 9 months)

STELLA Automotive AI provides conversational AI for the automotive industry. We help car dealers handle calls and book service appointments in a friendly conversational way, without the need for humans. • Rebuilt the test team to align with company goals. Established new processes to streamline work and scale to hundreds of customers. • Led migration of customers deployments from AWS to Azure, leading to 5% across the board savings and 0 customer churn. Owned the roadmap, coordinated and trained sister company, 3rd party team and internal team. • Managed strategic accounts including one of our largest customers. Doubled their deployments. • Handled data annotations and helped improve AI systems with Natural Language Understanding improve

Lead Software Engineer In Test

Promenade Group

Sep 2022 - May 2023 (9 months)

Promenade spun up a new team focused on helping partners across all of our businesses so I moved to help that group. • Helped launch a brand new application to all of our floral partners in less than 6 months • Built integration tests in PHP • Tested individual stories to help ensure integration with all of our other business units • Created mock servers for internal APIs and 3rd party services like Stripe for easier testing

QA Engineering Manager

Promenade Group

Apr 2021 - Sep 2022 (1 year 6 months)

After hiring my 3rd direct report I officially got the management title. I managed testers across 3 different business units before transferring them to their direct line managers. Spun up a second test team, this time of SDETs to build test automation across our platform. • Recruited, interviewed and hired 3 additional direct reports • Grew UI Test Automation feature coverage of our Platform from 0 to nearly 70% across our eCommerce app and nearly to 30% in our partner facing app in less than 6 months. • Integrated all UI tests into our CI pipeline in Gitlab using headless containers • Contributed those advancements to open source • Used modern testing methods for managing and coordinating testing processes across the company to minim

Board Member, President

Association for Software Testing

Nov 2020 - Nov 2024 (4 years 1 month)

The Association for Software Testing (AST) is an international non-profit professional organization with members in over 50 countries. AST is dedicated to building a community that values the role of testing as a skilled, relevant and essential to the production of better software. • President and Board Member of the Association for Software Testing. • Worked to partner with Altom to combine the AST-BBST and BBST® training program. • Updated AST-BBST materials prior to Altom partnership • Helped put on a number of Conferences of the Association for Software Testing (CAST)

Lead QA Automation Engineer

Promenade Group

May 2020 - Apr 2021 (1 year)

BloomNation rebranded Promenade Group and we launched two new businesses outside of Flowers: Pizza Shops and Liquor Stores. I took on a management role in addition to my I.C. responsibilities where I had 2 direct reports working on those other businesses. • Recruited, interviewed and hired 2 Software Test Engineers to work on separate business verticals. Both reporting directly to me. Supported them in their growth at the company. • Recruited, interviewed and hired engineers, product managers, VPs and many other roles in our growing company. • Updated and migrated our functional API tests to run via Newman CLI on our CI builds rather than solely run via Postman. • Mix of exploratory and automated testing focused on the full stack (mySQ

Board Member, Vice President

Association for Software Testing

Oct 2019 - Nov 2020 (1 year 2 months)

I was appointed to a second office, Vice President of the AST.

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Sr. QA Automation Engineer

Oct 2019 - May 2020 (8 months)

Still focusing on coaching developers, helping to test occasional stories, code reviews, pairing, etc. Built and maintain 2 distinct UI test automation frameworks: • Covering our main eCommerce application. We're using WebDriverIO to test scenarios where we collect people’s money, and have some functional and SEO coverage. Running headlessly in our own grid we’ve got support for major browsers like Chrome and Firefox with the added ability to test in Safari and other browsers through an integration with Browserstack. • Covering our Point of Sale (PoS) application. Built into our existing JS repo, we’re using Cypress to build small scalable UI acceptance tests that help our developers move quickly and catch big regressions. • Building ou

Board Member, Treasurer

Association for Software Testing

Oct 2018 - Nov 2020 (2 years 2 months)

I was elected to the Board of Directors by the membership and sit as Treasurer of the organization. I'm also a member of the executive committee.

QA Automation Engineer

Promenade Group

May 2018 - Oct 2019 (1 year 6 months)

Automation Engineer with a focus on coaching my developers to become better testers. I help test the occasional story, do code reviews (mostly in JavaScript), pair test with my developers, do production support, help manage our infrastructure and contribute to shipping high quality software by helping to scale our testing. • Mix of exploratory and automated testing focused on the whole stack using modern testing practices to keep test artifacts to a minimum and relevant nature. • Built a UI test automation framework ground up in WebDriverIO, JavaScript, and MochaJS for functional, scenario and SEO coverage. Hooked into our development pipeline and running headlessly in a container. • Reestablished our API automated tests which use Dredd

QA Engineer

Laurel Wolf

Jan 2017 - May 2018 (1 year 5 months)

Lead Test/ QA Engineer on our engineering team where I helped test individual stories, write UI level automation, review code + approve Pull Requests, pair test with my developers and contributed to shipping high quality software. Managed deployments across several systems, all following the git / GitHub workflow. Worked to accelerate our ability to ship quality software. • Mix of exploratory and automated testing focused on the full stack (Postgres DB, APIs, and UI) using modern testing practices. • Built and grew a UI test automation framework in Selenium, Ruby and RSpec for functional and scenario tests headlessly in a Docker container (to match our existing development setup). Integrated visual regression tests and browser coverage us

Software Test Engineer

Doctor Evidence LLC

May 2014 - Jan 2017 (2 years 9 months)

Lead test engineer (and sole automation developer) on the development team where I ran experiments designed to help our team improve our understanding of the product. By modeling the product and its changes, we built a test strategy and then tested using any number of appropriate techniques. Often this strategy involved taking a risk-based, automated and exploratory approach to testing while minimizing waste. • We used primarily modern software testing practices (exploratory charters, session-based testing, concept mapping) that focus on the value of information rather than artifacts or perceived quality control. • Due to our fast development cycles (and large changes) I built an automated GUI acceptance test framework using Ruby, RSpec a

Lead Quality Assurance Engineer

avaya

Oct 2012 - May 2014 (1 year 8 months)

Avaya acquired Conversive, Inc. (see below). I transitioned from running the testing department as a sole tester to being responsible for a small offshore test team (India & Vietnam) assigned to integrate our semi-automated web chat application into the Avaya brand. Included some hands-on testing paired with my development team, working with technical writers (as a subject matter expert), scoping the testing efforts with project and product managers while guiding and training the test team and triaging issues. Used a combination of exploratory and computer aided testing (Silktest) to bring up to “Avaya Standards”. Used mainly artifact-based management methods and systems (IBM Rational and HP Quality Center).

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Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Conversive Inc

May 2008 - Oct 2012 (4 years 6 months)

Ran the software testing department for enterprise SaaS, semi-automated enterprise web chat application. I did the testing, managed contract testers + technical writers and built and maintained a complex test lab of load balancers, switches with VLANs and virtual machines (ESXi). Wore multiple other hats including: system admin, release manager, technical support (clients - external and internal), operations manager and network admin. Used subversion for managing code, SpiraTeam for tracking bugs. Eventually switched towards "modern testing practices" (rapid testing, concept mapping, charters) for test activities and test design and session based test management for tracking results. Tested our web chat system, online management interface

Quality Control Analyst 2

Countrywide

Mar 2007 - May 2008 (1 year 3 months)

Software tester for Countrywide's mortgage origination system in the Edge platform group. Did a majority of testing against internal regulatory engines (FBW, Galileo, Newton) and their corresponding services using a wiki and acceptance testing framework called FitNesse. Used pair testing for collaboration when using FitNesse with my fellow testers and developers. Used a internal (homegrown) tracking system called Viper for bug and requirements tracking and departmental communication. Supported legacy systems based on AS/400 and newer technologies based on .NET, C#, SQL Server, XML and as previously mentioned FitNesse.

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QA Analyst

AIG SunAmerica

Sep 2005 - Mar 2007 (1 year 7 months)

Software tester for the Vision 2020 group at AIG SunAmerica which supported applications for insurance broker dealers. Tested on numerous new and legacy applications including client, asset, certification and regulatory tracking systems. Newer platforms were built on .NET and SQL Server while legacy systems were built on ASP and Oracle. Projects ranged in size from regular monthly releases to 6+ month projects, of which I was often the lead. Worked closely with other team members including QA (Testers), Developers, DBAs, BAs, PMs, etc. to gather information, check requirements and provide feedback. Mainly used Mercury Test Director for writing and executing test cases.

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Founder and CEO

Bay InfoSystems Inc

Oct 2004 - Dec 2009 (5 years 3 months)

Provider of technical services, technical consulting, and intellectual property review. Serving small and medium sized businesses in Northern and Southern California.

Chris Kenst

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