CTO & Full-Stack Engineer · Vancouver, BC
I studied English Literature and Classical Studies at UBC, which is either a red flag or a green flag, depending on who you ask. I left with something I didn't expect: a real comfort with ambiguity, and an instinct for finding the common ground in a conversation and the specific places where meaning starts to slip. What I loved about literature was how it refused to mean just one thing, every reader brings their own lens to a line, and somehow it all still adds up to something.
When I started thinking about what came next, the criteria I kept coming back to were simple: I wanted work that demanded constant learning, rewarded genuine curiosity, and felt like magic. A friend pointed me toward programming. I enrolled at Lighthouse Labs in 2019, and something clicked almost immediately, a well-named function reads like a sentence, good architecture holds together like a story that earns its ending, and something that starts as numbers and letters somehow becomes something that matters to a real person on the other end.
That feeling has only grown. Code can conjure a world for a specific fandom. It can give a busy parent back a Saturday afternoon. It can democratize knowledge, connect strangers across continents, and help someone track their symptoms and finally feel heard by a doctor, because good software in the right hands can change, and sometimes save, a life.
Literature taught me to look beyond what was written to what was intended, and how that intention lands differently as time passes and context shifts. That instinct shows up everywhere in my work. Coding makes the world smaller and more infinite.
Full-stack engineer turned CTO, with 7+ years spanning infrastructure, product engineering, and internal tooling. I currently lead the technical side of Circl, a clinical neurotech startup — sole engineer, full stack, responsible for infrastructure and healthcare compliance. I also work full-time as an IC at Later, which keeps me grounded in the day-to-day realities of building software at scale. My background in English Literature & Classical Studies is the unlikely through-line: I've always been more interested in how systems mean something than just how they work.
Lighthouse Labs · 2019
University of British Columbia
CTO of Circl, where we're building an objective measure of brain health. Most cognitive assessment today is subjective: a questionnaire, a clinician's best judgment. Circl turns raw brainwaves into clinically meaningful signals (P300 / N200) through a custom EEG headset, a mobile app, and HIPAA-grade cloud analytics, so concussion recovery and cognitive change can be tracked with data instead of guesswork.
It's the rare mission that's both genuinely hard and genuinely worth it: software that can help a person feel heard by their doctor and recover with evidence on their side. That's the work I want to be doing, and the kind of problem I lead best on.
Circl's edge is that the entire signal path is one coherent system, from the analog front-end on the headset to the clinician's dashboard. I stepped in over an existing platform — the headset, EEG signal capture, and iOS app — built the clinician dashboard, and now own that path end to end: modernizing and hardening what came before, and architecting everything from here forward across firmware, mobile, cloud services, a regulated data layer, and the infrastructure beneath. That ownership lets a small, capital-efficient team ship a complete, regulated, hardware-plus-software product and move quickly without the integration seams that usually slow a company like ours down. As we grow, it's also the architecture and the engineering culture I'm building a team into.
For the technically inclined, the stack I build and operate across:
A Pokémon cartomancy. Draw a three-card Past / Present / Future spread of Major Arcana, holographic foil, 3D card flips, and four swappable visual universes. Just a fun pleasure project while dreaming of playing Pokopia.
Stack: TypeScript, React, Vite, Cloudflare Workers, CSS 3D & filters
A little Claude robot that keeps an eye on your Claude usage, tracking sessions, watching usage, and summarizing the work actually done across a repo. A work in progress.
Stack: TypeScript, Node
Ever have an artist whose voice just hits your ear wrong — the one who somehow dominates every radio mix and auto-generated playlist? Yea No Player lets you sign in and give them a firm “yea, no” (the Canadian kind, the one that means absolutely not), so the music keeps going without your least-favourite artists sneaking back in just because they're trending.
Stack: TypeScript
A small, embeddable widget for book lovers, channeling everything I loved about studying literature into something you can actually drop on a page.
Stack: React, TypeScript
The luminous little flower-spirit who roams this whole site now has a game of her own. Guide Sprout through a procedurally generated hedge maze, foraging treasures to trade with the guardians and finding her way home before twilight falls.
Stack: TypeScript, Vite, Cloudflare Workers, SVG
Companies, products, and components I admire.
They built a virtual home for book lovers that captures everything I loved about studying literature, the shared discovery, the debate over themes, the 'you have to read this' urgency. It's the best parts of an English degree, minus the tuition.
A masterclass in balancing creative freedom with real purpose. Watching them pivot toward sustainability without losing what makes a Lego set feel like infinite possibility is the kind of long-game thinking I deeply respect.
Partly because they do incredible work preserving wild spaces that genuinely matter. Partly because I have a deep and probably unwise desire to pet a bobcat.
The rare social platform that figured out intention. Nobody opens Pinterest to doom-scroll, they open it because they're planning something. A mood board, a search engine, and a planning tool rolled into one, and somehow it never feels overwhelming.
They make board games built for fans, and it shows. The Villainous line is the best example, every villain plays differently, and the components make the whole thing feel like an event.
Hades is one of the best arguments I know that constraints breed creativity. They took a genre where story is usually an afterthought and made the repetition the point, every run peels back another layer.
A woman-owned Canadian business with a genuinely innovative model: partner with female artists, compensate them fairly, and channel their work into a hobby people actually sit down and spend time with.
Games, puzzles, and stories I fall into.
To reach Kira, use the contact section on this site (kiraporter.ca) or connect on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/kiracdporter). Her email address is available on the live site, once loaded.
When I meet someone new, I tend to talk about code the way I talk about stories. To me, code breaks barriers; it lets a person light up their own corner of the world, like a character who just discovered their magic powers. That's the part that resonates with me. I'm an introvert and a happily ADHD nerd, so reaching out isn't my reflex, but I light up over a good conversation: talk shop, build something together, or find a mentor (I love supporting women in tech, in either direction). I promise a thoughtful reply.