Henning Perl
Sofware Security Engineering at Ory Corp
Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHenning Perl is a seasoned software security engineer and entrepreneur with 16 years of experience building cloud-native, production-grade systems and developer-facing security tools. As co-founder and former CTO/COO of Code Intelligence, he helped make fuzz testing accessible to developer teams at enterprises like Bosch, Deutsche Börse and Deutsche Telekom, reducing time-to-fix by shifting vulnerability discovery left. Now at Ory, he contributes deep backend and DevOps expertise to open-source identity and access projects (Hydra, Oathkeeper, Keto, Kratos), including work on database migrations, stateless auth flows, gRPC middleware, and flaky-test hardening. His academic foundation (PhD-level work in computer science) underpins a pragmatic focus on observability, reproducible debugging, and CI/CD-agnostic tooling. Colleagues will tell you he blends research-grade rigor with product sensibility—turning complex protocols and cryptography-adjacent problems into maintainable engineering.
16 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Promotion, Informatik, magna cum laude, Promotion, Informatik, magna cum laude at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität BonnMaster of Science - MS, Informatik, Master of Science - MS, Informatik at Leibniz Universität Hannover
Github Skills (34)
database-migrations10
dependency-management10
authorizations10
apidoc10
openid-connect10
testing10
configuration-management10
user-authentication10
authentication10
identity-management10
security10
go10
api10
api-gateway10
sql10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
ory/keto
May 2022 - Jan 2023
The most scalable and customizable permission server on the market. Fix your slow or broken permission system with Google's proven "Zanzibar" approach. Supports ACL, RBAC, and more. Written in Go, cloud native, headless, API-first. Available as a service on Ory Network and for self-hosters.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 235 reviews, 111 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Henning primarily focused on maintaining and updating dependencies within the Go codebase. They addressed linter warnings and updated Go module dependencies, ensuring the project's stability. Furthermore, the user made changes related to gRPC client configuration, suggesting involvement in API interaction and potentially integrating with other services. The commits demonstrate a focus on keeping the project dependencies up to date.
grpciamzero-trustrest-apisfine-grained-authorization
ory/kratos
May 2022 - Sep 2022
Headless cloud-native authentication and identity management written in Go. Scales to a billion+ users. Replace Homegrown, Auth0, Okta, Firebase with better UX and DX. Passkeys, Social Sign In, OIDC, Magic Link, Multi-Factor Auth, SMS, SAML, TOTP, and more. Runs everywhere, runs best on Ory Network.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:297 reviews, 2 commits, 130 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Henning primarily contributed to the backend of the ory/kratos project, making changes related to identity management and authentication. Their work includes implementing and refining database interactions, specifically around verifiable addresses and recovery mechanisms. They also worked on improving the resilience of webhooks and adding an API for batch identity inserts. They also updated tests for OIDC flows and fixed a number of bugs.
yubikeyidpsignheadachesthink
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.