Jonathan Whitaker
Staff Software Engineer at Reddit, Inc.
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Whitaker is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building and operating large-scale, high-concurrency distributed systems, currently at Reddit and previously driving the architecture of Okta FGA/OpenFGA. He combines deep systems and security expertise—authoring graph-based permission engines inspired by Google Zanzibar—with hands-on SRE practices for multi-region Kubernetes and cloud-native deployments. As an OpenFGA core maintainer and contributor to the widely-used openfga project, he’s improved server stability, health checks, and graceful shutdowns that matter in production. His background spans embedded medical-grade software to cloud IAM platforms, giving him a rare blend of low-level rigor and distributed-systems scale. Based in Salt Lake City, he’s an outdoor enthusiast who brings the same practical curiosity from trail-building to building resilient infrastructure.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Utah
Github Skills (18)
architecture10
memory-management10
http10
c1110
c1710
compatibility10
go10
compile10
golang10
compiler10
architectures10
server10
grpc10
testing9
request-validation9
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
openfga/openfga
May 2022 - Jan 2023
A high performance and flexible authorization/permission engine built for developers and inspired by Google Zanzibar
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:22 releases, 2626 reviews, 117 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan's commits primarily focus on improving the OpenFGA server's functionality and stability. They implemented graceful shutdown procedures for both the HTTP and gRPC servers, ensuring proper resource cleanup. They also introduced request validation middleware to enhance data integrity and made the server's binding addresses configurable. Additionally, they added gRPC health checks and integrated them with the `/healthz` endpoint, improving the monitoring and health of the service.
golangfine-grained-authorizationauthorizationsecurityauthentication
sosy-lab/sv-benchmarks
Oct 2015 - Oct 2015
Collection of Verification Tasks
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs in 29 days
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily contributed to fixing undefined behavior issues, particularly memory allocation problems, within the verification tasks. Their changes involve modifying code, often in C files, to ensure proper memory initialization and prevent access to unallocated memory locations. The user also addressed issues related to unsupported inline assembly calls, ensuring compatibility with both GCC and Clang compilers. Furthermore, the user initialized the fields of the QType structure.
securitytlaverification
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