S9 E31: The Dynamic Configuration Era: Overthrowing Feature Flag Tech Debt and Replicating FAANG-Class Release Agility with Konrad Niemiec, Founder of Lekko
episodePreviously titled “S9 E31: Konrad Niemiec, Lekko” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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We were just really focused on, oh, what is the best parts of these solutions that we can take and put together into a product most easily and deliver it to customers? But what we didn't have a great understanding about was what problems are we solving? Are we solving the problem of getting untested code out to production and being able to roll that back quickly? Are we solving the problem of a product manager or a customer success person or a sales person or an ops person making a change to software safely? Like what problems are we actually solving with this tool and who needs this the most? And who is that initial user base? My name is Konrad Niemietz. I'm the founder and CEO of Lecko.
This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share what it takes to change an industry, who built the teams that have their back, keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life.
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All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host, Noah Lappart. And today, how Conrad Nimitz built you a way to ship faster. with no redeploys and no mistakes. This episode is sponsored by KiteWorks. Legacy managed file transfer tools lack proper security, putting sensitive data at risk. With KiteWorks MFT, companies can send automated or ad hoc files in a fully integrated, highly secure manner. The solution is FedRAMP moderate authorized by the Department of Defense and has been so since 2017. Step into the future of secure managed file transfer with KiteWorks. Visit KiteWorks.com to get started. This episode is sponsored by ClearQuery. ClearQuery is the analytics for humans platform. With their full suite of features, you can go from data ingestion to automated insights seamlessly.
With Ask ClearQuery, you can find valuable insights into your data using plain English. Don't miss the opportunity to simplify your data analytics with ClearQuery. Get started today at clearquery.io slash code story. Konrad Nibiec lives in San Francisco. He's very close to his family, of which his parents are Polish immigrants. He started coding when he was 11 while working for his dad. His core values are curiosity and community, which drives a lot of what he does outside of tech. He likes to learn other things, and his current hobby set includes surfing and spikeball, of which he's working on perfecting his spin serve. Conrad worked at Uber on the self-driving team. After a few years, he wanted to be less of a cog in the machine and joined a small startup.
He introduced a feature flagging platform and quickly realized how fast configuration bloat appeared in the platform. He also realized how dynamic configuration could take the platform beyond the limits of feature flags. This is the creation story of Lekko.
So Leko is a different take on the problems that feature flagging tools are trying to solve. And we're basing a lot of what we're doing on some implementations at big tech companies. Those systems are called dynamic configuration systems. And we're hoping to apply that to let engineers and teams that build software build their features in a way that gets out to customers as fast as possible. without the complexity and the risk these downsides that traditional feature flagging tools do and frankly let engineers ship features in an imperfect world where things are changing all the time deadlines are shifting requirements are shifting you don't have the right test data you don't have the right integration tests we really hope that engineers can ship these features as correctly and safely but also as quickly as possible
So I was at Uber for a few years working on the self-driving team. We were trying to figure out how do we connect self-driving cars to Uber's network. And that was really exciting. But after a few years, I learned a lot and I wanted to be less of a cog in the machine and really make some impact. So I joined a small startup called Sisu. There, I was the 18th engineer.
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