Alex Gessner
Security Engineer at Citadel
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Gessner is a security engineer with 13 years of experience building and operating end-to-end encrypted systems, currently focused on secure infrastructure and DevOps for large-scale services. He helped evolve Keybase’s unique multi-device cryptographic identity platform into production-grade chat, file sharing, and team-management products, and later led security DevOps efforts at Zoom after the acquisition. Earlier roles include directing data and engineering at ShopKeep, where he built data platforms, pipelines, and backend systems while growing engineering teams and aligning technical tradeoffs with business needs. Comfortable across Golang, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and Postgres, he favors strong types, refactoring, and well-considered interfaces and dislikes untested code. Known as a thoughtful manager who keeps large systems in his head, he also contributes to open-source tooling (notably backend work on the keybase/client Go codebase) and experiments with practical bots and small automation projects.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
International Baccalaureate, Everything, International Baccalaureate, Everything at Richard Montgomery HSMS, Systems and Information Engineering, MS, Systems and Information Engineering at University of Virginia
hebrew (rusty), spanish (rusty)
Github Skills (8)
go10
api10
apidoc10
testing9
team-management9
json8
cryptography8
distributed-systems7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
keybase/client
Jun 2018 - Jan 2021
Keybase Go Library, Client, Service, OS X, iOS, Android, Electron
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:197 commits, 231 PRs, 617 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on back-end development, making several contributions to the Keybase Go Library. Their work involved modifying and testing code related to user signup, including handling non-ASCII characters in device names and refactoring signup-related functions. They also made changes to team management features, specifically in the areas of web-of-trust (WOT) and modifying handling of group conversations.
androidelectrongoioskeybase
xgess/keybase_merkle_prover
Nov 2019 - Jun 2021
dockerized, deployable python keybase chat bot that OpenTimestamps Keybase's merkle roots
Contributions:19 commits, 12 pushes, 3 branches in 1 year 6 months
chatbotkeybasepython
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