# Kolton Andrus

> Kolton Andrus is the co-founder and CEO of Gremlin, a software reliability company founded in 2016 with Matthew Fornaciari. He previously built failure-injection tooling at Amazon and Netflix and coordinated major incidents as a Call Leader. Based in Denver, he advocates controlled failure experiments that help engineers discover weaknesses before outages affect customers.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Gremlin
- **Organizations:** Gremlin, Netflix, Amazon, Mindshare Technologies, Meridias Capital
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Utah, Master of Science in Computer Science, University of Utah
- **Known for:** Designed and built Netflix’s FIT failure-injection service., Built fault-injection tooling at Amazon., Co-founded Gremlin in 2016.

## Career timeline

- **2005-2007** — Worked as a software engineer at Meridias Capital.
- **2007-2009** — Worked as a software engineer at Mindshare Technologies.
- **2009-2013** — Worked at Amazon in software engineering and management, building internal fault-injection tooling and serving as a Call Leader.
- **2013-2016** — Worked at Netflix on the Edge Platform team; designed and built FIT and served as a Call Leader.
- **2014** — Co-authored the October introduction to Netflix FIT with Naresh Gopalani and Ben Schmaus.
- **2016** — Co-founded Gremlin with Matthew Fornaciari; presented failure-testing research with Peter Alvaro at QCon London.
- **2017** — Announced Gremlin’s public launch and $7.5 million Series A on December 12.
- **2022** — Moved from CEO to CTO as Josh Leslie became CEO, announced February 9.
- **2025** — Returned to the CEO role at Gremlin.
- **2026** — Announced Gremlin Foresight AI on October 7.

## Achievements

- Designed and built Netflix’s FIT failure-injection service.
- Built fault-injection tooling at Amazon.
- Co-founded Gremlin in 2016.
- Led Gremlin during its initial growth; the company reported exceeding $10 million in annualized recurring revenue in 2021.
- Co-presented Monkeys in Lab Coats with Peter Alvaro at QCon London in 2016.
- Recipient of the University of Utah College of Engineering Clyde Christensen Scholarship, as listed on LinkedIn.
- Lists US patent 9021008, Managing targeted scripts, issued April 28, 2015, on LinkedIn.

## Latest updates

- **2026-10** — Announced Gremlin Foresight AI on October 7, describing supervised agents for reliability testing, analysis, and remediation verification.
- **2026-10** — Discussed his return as CEO and prevention-focused reliability work on Modern CTO, episode 985, published October 8.
- **2026-04** — Discussed reliability risks in AI-generated software with Sean Falconer on Software Huddle; the publisher’s post is dated April 15.

## Links

- Website: https://www.gremlin.com/author/kolton-andrus
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/KoltonAndrus

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/kolton-andrus
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-22