Joona Kiiski is a Finnish software engineer with a Master's degree in physics from University of Jyväskylä, currently residing in California, helping to pioneer in autonomous mobility.

In 2009, Joona Kiiski tweaked Tord Romstad's open source chess program Glaurung and called it Smaug. The derivations of Glaurung, notably Stockfish by Marco Costalba and Smaug was controversial, and other chess programmers were annoyed with their original efforts over years, while Tord Romstad appreciated the development with his understanding and interpretation of the open source idea in competitive computer chess. In 2009 they joint forces on Stockfish, Marco's initial branch of Glaurung's evolutionary tree.