Austin Byers
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAustin Byers is a backend engineer and founding engineer turned security observability specialist with 11 years of experience building secure, cloud-native SaaS systems at scale. He blends deep expertise in Go and Python with serverless architectures (Lambda, DynamoDB), IaC tools like Pulumi/Terraform, and a strong focus on operational security and cost-efficient reliability. Austin has shipped high-throughput systems (designing load tests over 100M events/hour at Klaviyo), led migrations and Pulumi rollouts across multi-account AWS environments, and helped startups evolve from prototype to production as a two-time founding engineer. His open-source contributions include meaningful security tooling work on Airbnb’s BinaryAlert and StreamAlert, showing practical experience in real-time malware detection and serverless data analysis. Based in Chicago, he pairs hands-on implementation with mentorship and hiring experience, and often surfaces non-obvious wins like integrating live testing and security linting that materially improve long-term operability.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at International BaccalaureateMaster of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of Chicago
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
terraformer10
aws10
devops10
python10
terraform10
testing10
cicd9
security9
yara9
serverless9
rule-engine8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
airbnb/binaryalert
Aug 2017 - Sep 2018
BinaryAlert: Serverless, Real-time & Retroactive Malware Detection.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:5 releases, 4 reviews, 54 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Austin contributed to the BinaryAlert project by fixing a batcher issue related to empty buckets and adding corresponding tests. They also refactored the `manage.py` script and implemented improvements to the YARA rules update process. Furthermore, the user upgraded to Terraform ~v0.10.1 and refactored the S3-related configurations. They integrated a live testing option and improved error handling for the analyzer and batcher components.
real-timemalware-detectionyarasecurityserverless
airbnb/streamalert
May 2017 - Sep 2018
StreamAlert is a serverless, realtime data analysis framework which empowers you to ingest, analyze, and alert on data from any environment, using datasources and alerting logic you define.
Role in this project:Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:65 commits, 87 PRs, 204 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Austin contributed to the core functionality of the StreamAlert CLI tool, specifically addressing the configuration of prefixes. The user made Pylint cleanup and enforcement as well as implemented Bandit security linting and dependency updates. The user also refactored rule importing, consolidating the alert processor to use a single instance and updated deployment with -auto-approve, all of which improved the codebase's security, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
realtimerealtime-dataserverlessaws-lambdaaws
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