Kresten is the CTO and founder of Humio. In his previous role as CTO of Trifork, was responsible for technical strategy, and spent most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for GOTO and QCon conferences.

Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system.

Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. More recently, he has been hacking Erlang projects, and founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine, as well as several smaller open source packages for Erlang. Kresten has a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Aarhus.