The development of renewable, alternative jet fuels presents an exigent challenge to the aviation community. In this work, a streamlined methodology for building computationally efficient kinetic models of real fuels from shock tube experiments is developed and applied to a low cetane-number, broad-boiling alternative jet fuel (termed C-4). A multi-wavelength laser absorption spectroscopy technique was used to determine species time-histories during the high-temperature pyrolysis of C-4, and a batch gradient descent optimization routine built a hybrid-chemistry (HyChem) kinetic model from the measured data. The model was evaluated using combustor-relevant, high-pressure ignition delay time measurements with satisfactory agreement. The present model enables predictive simulations of C-4 in practical environments, while the underlying methodology described here can be readily extended to build kinetic models for a broad range of real fuels of interest. (C) 2019 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.