Ian Ferguson
Senior Staff Engineer at Datadog
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Ferguson is a Senior Staff Engineer with 11 years of experience building secure, scalable infrastructure and identity systems, currently leading platform work at Datadog in Washington, D.C. He has driven large-scale projects including global RBAC control planes across hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, production isolation and security enhancements, and a credential management system that scaled tenfold to 100k req/s. Ian combines hands-on systems engineering (Go, CI/CD, Kubernetes) with cross-team leadership—creating standards like an internal OAuth/OIDC/SPIFFE-based service authentication model and chairing cross-team working groups. His background spans engineering management, CI/CD platform ownership, and product-focused roles from startups to national political campaigns, giving him a rare mix of operational rigor and stakeholder-facing delivery. He also contributes to upstream Vault-related projects and has a track record of replacing bespoke tooling with robust open-source solutions. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architecture that balances security, scale and day-to-day operability.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computing Information & Technology, B.S., Computing Information & Technology at Guilford College
Github Skills (105)
distributed-tracing10
terraform10
security10
ruby10
paseto10
profiling10
opentelemetry10
encryption10
monitoring10
hashicorp-vault10
linux10
hashicorp10
secrets10
apm-agent10
vault10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ianferguson/vault-java-driver
Sep 2020 - Mar 2022
Zero-dependency Java client for HashiCorp's Vault
Contributions:2 releases, 10 PRs, 44 pushes in 1 year 6 months
zerovaulthashicorpjavazero-dependency
ianferguson/ianferguson.io
Mar 2015 - Jun 2024
home page generator
Contributions:2 PRs, 123 pushes, 9 branches in 9 years 4 months
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.