Andrew Dunham
Member Of Technical Staff at Tailscale
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Dunham is a security-focused software engineer with 13 years of experience building robust back-end systems and tooling, currently a Member of Technical Staff at Tailscale. He combines deep expertise in reverse engineering and computer security with practical web development skills in Python and Ruby, honed through roles at Stripe and Matasano. Andrew contributes to prominent open-source projects—helping harden Tailscale's resolver and ICMP handling, improving Rust OpenSSL bindings, and optimizing performance-sensitive code—while maintaining statically linked *nix toolchains for reproducible deployments. He has a track record of shipping defensive, production-grade features like health endpoints, per-client TCP limits, and improved error handling. Based in Ottawa, he pairs low-level systems knowledge with pragmatic DevOps experience, and his contributions often reveal an emphasis on reliability and observability that’s not immediately obvious from job titles alone.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.Eng.Mgmt., Software Engineering and Management, B.Eng.Mgmt., Software Engineering and Management at McMaster University
Japanese, English, Italian, Russian, French
Github Skills (43)
algorithm10
ss10
algorithms10
iteration10
ssl10
crossbuild10
sslv310
bash10
graph-database10
data-structure10
iterable10
musl10
go10
dns10
openssl10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
andrew-d/static-binaries
Feb 2015 - Apr 2020
Various *nix tools built as statically-linked binaries
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & System Administrator
DevOps Engineer & System AdministratorContributions:70 commits, 3 PRs, 67 pushes in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on building and configuring static binaries for various *nix tools within the repository. Their contributions involved creating build scripts using Bash, integrating dependencies such as musl, ncurses, readline, and OpenSSL. Furthermore, they added and upgraded binaries for multiple tools, including socat, nmap, p0f, binutils, yasm, and others, along with some Windows versions and OS X support.
dotfilesnixosas-builtbinaries
tailscale/tailscale
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:793 reviews, 92 commits, 499 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Tailscale project by adding unit tests and fuzzer tests for the resolver and for ICMP handling. They also worked on improving the overall performance of the project by implementing a per-client limit on in-flight TCP forwards, and by optimizing the structure of the code to avoid re-allocating maps. Moreover, the user worked on improving the robustness of the project by adding error handling and by handling cases where the openresolv commands fail. They also added a /healthz endpoint for monitoring the project and exposed gVisor metrics through expvar.
secureprivacysecurityvpnwireguard
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