Kaska is my independent engineering practice. I’m Aaron Careaga, a senior software engineer and former CTO. I started Kaska in 2016. I’m interested in how software shapes what people notice and how they make decisions.
Product engineering
I work with the people using a system to understand what it needs to do, then design and build it.
Technical leadership
I help teams work through technical tradeoffs and carry their decisions into production. I stay involved in the code.
AI systems
I connect AI tools to company data with permissions that limit access, and build evaluations to check how they behave.
SnowObs
The same avalanche conditions can require different actions for crews, machinery, or work areas. At Snowbound Solutions, I built a SnowObs workflow that connects hazard assessments to an operation’s planned actions.
I led its design and implementation, then the analysis and paper documenting its first season of use. The work builds on published avalanche-risk research and the operational perspective of avalanche practitioners.
National Avalanche Center
At Snowbound, I work on NAC publishing tools and forecast and observation APIs. These systems help avalanche centers publish information to their websites and other applications.
In FY2026 (July 2025–June 2026), the NAC platform recorded 980,000 forecast-widget users, 5.4 million widget pageviews, and approximately 138 million forecast and observation API requests.
KITE and Nucla
I joined KITE as its second engineer and went on to lead engineering as CTO through the employee buyout into Nucla. At Nucla, I designed and deployed a service that lets AI tools work with enterprise data using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), with scoped access and application evaluations.