About Kaperkunde
Who you would be working with
I am Kevin Lohman. Kaperkunde is my freelance practice, registered in the Netherlands and run from Amstelveen, just south of Amsterdam.
Twenty years of building software, most of it in Silicon Valley. Senior software engineer at Meta through February 2026, and at Apple from 2020 to 2024. Before that, Distinguished Architect for iOS at BlackBerry, after five years as iOS Software Architect at Good Technology — work that produced four granted patents in mobile inter-container communication and security. Earlier still, six years in the US Navy deploying SHF satellite communication suites, with a BSBA in Computer Information Systems from Hawaii Pacific University earned along the way.
From 2023 to 2025 I ran my own independent software practice in California. Kaperkunde is its Dutch continuation, started when my family moved here in 2026.
What I do
- Fractional CTO and technical advisory — for companies with a product and no technical leader. Assessments, architecture review, technical hiring, and diligence support.
- Interim senior engineering — embedded 3 to 12 month contracts on your team.
- Fixed-scope product builds — MVPs and defined pieces of product, senior-built and AI-accelerated.
- AI in the development lifecycle — agents, MCP servers and agentic workflows that make an engineering team faster at requirements, code, tests, reviews and documentation, with the guardrails and measurement to keep it safe.
What I do not do: I am one engineer, not an agency. If you need a team of six, I will say so and point you at people who do that well.
Career
Kaperkunde — Founder · Amstelveen, NL · May 2026 – present
Independent consultancy. Interim senior engineering, fractional CTO and technical advisory for Dutch and international clients, alongside my own products — Plek.je, a multi-tenant EU SaaS I designed, built and operate solo, and GoDutch.us.
Meta — Senior Software Engineer · Sep 2025 – Feb 2026
iOS engineering on messaging and growth surfaces at billion-user scale. Built and shipped an AI workflow that automated our team's code-review intake: it identified the pull requests relevant to us, pre-reviewed the code, and routed each one to the right human review group.
BadPirate Garage — Founder · Jun 2023 – Sep 2025
Independent practice in California, and the direct predecessor to Kaperkunde. Client engagements and self-directed product builds at the AI and mobile convergence.
Grindr — Staff Software Engineer · Jan 2024 – Jun 2024
Led platform and architectural efforts through a post-restructure rebuild of the engineering organisation, and started the iOS migration from Objective-C to Swift. iOS lead on the AI Development Architecture workgroup, establishing how AI would be used in day-to-day development across an unusually lean engineering organisation for its scale.
Apple — Senior Software Engineer, Special Projects Group · Jun 2020 – Jan 2024
User-interface and hardware-integration work on an unreleased iOS product, in Swift, SwiftUI and Objective-C, alongside iOS foundation and internal developer-automation projects.
UnifyID — Lead iOS Software Engineer · Aug 2019 – Jun 2020
Early-stage startup. Built an authentication SDK driven by passive-signal machine-learning models, including the sensor integration and the data-collection tooling used to gather and validate training signal.
Facebook — Senior Software Engineer · May 2017 – Aug 2019
iOS engineer on the News Feed Growth and App Messaging teams — product features and mobile infrastructure at a scale of billions of users.
BlackBerry — Distinguished Architect, iOS · Nov 2015 – May 2017
Set iOS technical direction for BlackBerry's enterprise mobility platform following its acquisition of Good Technology.
Good Technology — iOS Software Architect · Jan 2011 – Nov 2015
Owned product architecture for Good For Enterprise on iPhone and led its full refactor from C++ core frameworks and UI to Objective-C. The work produced four granted US patents in inter-container communication and security, and the product became BlackBerry's principal iOS offering.
Apple — Software Designer, Customer Systems · Mar 2010 – Jan 2011
Objective-C and WebKit integration with early-generation UIKit client work.
US Navy — Electronic Technician · 2002 – 2008
Deployed SHF satellite communications suites worldwide. Two Navy Achievement Medals; Top Secret clearance. BSBA in Computer Information Systems from Hawaii Pacific University, earned in parallel.
Skills
AI engineering. OpenAI, Claude, Qwen and Llama, plus self-hosted open-weight models on my own GPU infrastructure — chosen per workload on cost, latency and data sensitivity. MCP servers and clients, agent orchestration, tool calling, RAG, context engineering, and multi-agent and human-in-the-loop workflows. Evaluation and observability, so an AI capability's quality, reliability and cost are measurable rather than anecdotal.
Mobile. Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit and Objective-C, on iOS since 2008. React Native. Mobile architecture, Objective-C to Swift migration, accessibility, App Store delivery, and mobile security — the subject of the four patents.
Web and backend. TypeScript, React, Next.js and Node; Python; Hack/PHP; C++. GraphQL with Hasura and Apollo, REST, Prisma, Postgres, MariaDB, ClickHouse.
Platform and delivery. Docker, Kubernetes, Coolify, CI/CD, GitHub and GitLab, Jenkins, Bazel, Playwright end-to-end testing, S3, Linux. Provisioning, backups, analytics and billing for systems I run myself.
Practice. The full development lifecycle — requirements through operations. Software architecture, automated testing, DevOps, application and mobile security, policy-as-code guardrails, technical due diligence, engineering hiring, and mentoring.
How I got here
In 1989 my dad brought home a work computer — an Apple II/e — and I became obsessed with technology as a multiplier of human effort and reach. That turned into a career that ran through circuits and electrical engineering, networks and satellite systems, information security, and eventually two decades of software work among some of the best engineers I have met, in startups and at Apple, Meta and BlackBerry.
In 2026 my family and I moved to the Netherlands. I still enjoy complex problems more than easy ones, and I would rather tell a client something inconvenient early than expensively late.
Why "Kaperkunde"
I wanted a Dutch name that carried both hard-earned technical judgement and hacker culture — getting the impossible done with limited resources. I also wanted it to hold on to the Navy years: adventure, calculated risk, and delivering under pressure.
Kaperkunde translates roughly as "pirate-ology", the skills of the privateer. A can-do attitude, backed by deep experience.
Working together
I take a small number of engagements at a time, remote or on-site across the Randstad, working in English and alongside Dutch-speaking teams. Rates on request; fractional CTO pricing is published here. There is more detail on the work itself on the track record page.
Business details
Kaperkunde is registered with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel). For anything else, the contact page reaches me directly.
- Business name: Kaperkunde
- Owner: Kevin Lohman
- Chamber of Commerce (KvK): 42061326
- Branch number (vestigingsnummer): 000065649168
- VAT number (btw-id): NL005465494B06
- Registered address: Prof. E.M. Meijerslaan 1, Amstelveen, The Netherlands
- Legal notices: legal@kaperkun.de
- Privacy requests: privacy@kaperkun.de