James Renken
Managing Director at Internet Security Research Group
British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Renken is a seasoned infrastructure and site reliability leader with over a decade of hands-on experience building and operating hybrid on‑premise and cloud Linux environments. As founder and Managing Director of Sandwich Internet he scaled a one‑server operation into a multi‑datacenter anycast and BGP-backed hosting platform serving 1,000+ clients, and as an SRE at Let's Encrypt he helped scale systems that issue hundreds of millions of active certificates. He combines deep systems engineering—Go back-end contributions to the widely used Let's Encrypt Boulder CA project—with a pragmatic focus on reliability, security, and automated testing. A former practicing attorney, he brings uncommon strengths in regulatory thinking, investigative analysis, and clear technical documentation to risk‑sensitive infrastructure problems. Based in British Columbia, he is comfortable bridging operational leadership, low-level engineering, and long-term service reliability for Internet‑facing applications.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
University of California San DiegoJuris Doctor (J.D.), Law, Juris Doctor (J.D.), Law at Brooklyn Law School
Github Skills (14)
go10
certificate-authority10
acme10
testing9
go-testing9
rate-limiting8
redis8
apidoc7
api7
mtls6
tls126
tls136
libtls6
rfc5
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
letsencrypt/boulder
Aug 2021 - Jan 2022
An ACME-based certificate authority, written in Go.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:522 reviews, 3 commits, 122 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `letsencrypt/boulder` project, which is a certificate authority written in Go. Their commits focused on enhancing the `bad-key-revoker` component, improving its efficiency by adding conditions for certificate expiration checks. They also made improvements to testing, including the addition of fake clocks for better hermeticity. Furthermore, the user worked on rate limiting mechanisms by replacing SET with INCRBY calls and introducing related feature flags.
certificate-authoritygoboulderacmetls
letsencrypt/openzfs-nvme-databases
Sep 2020 - Oct 2022
Contributions:16 commits, 14 PRs, 13 pushes in 2 years 1 month
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