St. Louis
Nathan Tippy
Consulting and advice — bridging tech and management
I like building things, and I lean technical. A lot of the work I am hired for is management: priorities, hiring, and keeping hard systems reliable. I sit in the middle — clear with engineers, clear with leadership — and help both sides make the hard calls without the buzzwords.
Consulting
I do consulting and advice. Shared ownership of the hard calls, not a slide deck full of jargon.
- What to build next. Help pick the path that fits the team you have, and say no to the parts that only look clever.
- Who to hire. Name the roles that matter for reliability and platform work, and how to interview for them.
- Keeping systems up. Design so failures stay contained, load has somewhere to go, and on-call stays boring.
- When rules matter. Access, records, and infrastructure that still make sense when auditors and uptime both show up.
- RAG and retrieval in production. The plumbing and governance around it — not a notebook demo.
Use the form below. Say what you need and leave a way to reply. This page never shows an address of mine.
Eventum
Since September 2025 I have been CTO and co-founder of Eventum, Inc. Rhetor8 is Eventum's name for governed retrieval.
Background
Thirty years as a software engineer. I have done OCI consulting. I still write and review code in Java, AWS, Terraform, and Rust when that is the fastest way to get to a straight answer. Last year I led RAG infrastructure work. I attended Strange Loop for many years.
Recent work
steady_state
steady_state is a Rust actor framework for long-running Linux services: isolated actors, non-blocking ring buffers, Erlang-style supervisors, and visual telemetry. Repository: kmf-lab/steady-state-stack. Crate: steady_state (crates.io owner nathantippy).
Leaderboard
KMF Leaderboard helps maintainers with GitHub Sponsors turn support into issue ranking, private announcements, and encrypted conversations—without KMF touching the money. Product overview: KMF-Leaderboard.
In public
- KMF Lab. Keep Moving Forward. The lab sponsors the St. Louis Rust meetup.
- GitHub: kmf-lab and nathantippy.
- STL Rust. I host the St. Louis Rust meetup.
Contact
Tell me what you need help with. Name and email so I can reply. Attach a brief or job description if you have one.
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