Why I Joined Kepler
After Meta and four seed-stage startups, Susannah, Kepler’s Founding Engineer, shares why building fully traceable AI was a challenge she couldn’t pass up.
First, a bit about me
Hi! I’m Susannah, Founding Engineer at Kepler. After studying Computer Science at Stanford, I worked as a senior engineer at Facebook on big data problems, which shaped how I think about building reliable systems.
Since then, I’ve joined four seed-stage startups to build and accelerate engineering. I’ve learned what actually matters when building early-stage startups. Every career move I make is extremely intentional, and Kepler is no exception.
Most recently, I was Head of Engineering at Enigma Labs, where I built and led teams across full-stack engineering, data science, computer vision, and mobile. We scaled to over 300k users and built a unique dataset capturing anomalous activity in our skies: real data that demanded careful system design, seamless products, and strong infrastructure.
So why Kepler?
A few things made this an easy decision.
First, the founder. I jumped at the chance to work with Vinoo, who is rare in how they think: deeply technical, highly opinionated about quality, and grounded in real product instincts. Beyond years of experience shipping at Palantir, Vinoo has built and exited a startup. That lived experience shows up in the intention behind every decision.
Second, the stage and ownership. I joined Kepler as the first Founding Engineer. That means real ownership across product, infrastructure, and culture. Not just building features, but helping define how the company builds: the technical bar we set, the shortcuts we refuse to take, and the systems we choose to invest in.
Third, the problem itself. Kepler is tackling an unusually hard challenge: building AI systems that are fully traceable, with end-to-end provenance. No black boxes. No hand-waving. Deterministic data. We’re building agentic systems where every output can be inspected, understood, and trusted. While finance is our starting point, the underlying platform we’re designing extends far beyond it, into any industry where precision of the data matters as much as the data itself.
I joined Kepler for the people, the ownership, and the chance to work on a problem that’s genuinely hard and genuinely worth solving. If that excites you too, we’re hiring.
Read more: In Introducing Kepler, our CEO Vinoo shares the founding story and the architecture behind verifiable AI.