Josh Van Leeuwen is a Senior Software Engineer based in England with a decade of hands-on experience building reliable, secure back-end systems. He specializes in cloud-native and distributed systems, contributing notably to high-profile open-source projects like cert-manager (TLS certificate automation for Kubernetes) and Dapr (event-driven runtime), where he improved uninstall flows, refactored security-sensitive codepaths, and strengthened placement and state-store stability. Josh combines practical security engineering with backend craftsmanship—removing inefficient secret access patterns and hardening actor/state handling—to make production systems more robust and maintainable. A First Class Computer Science graduate from the University of Bristol, he balances deep technical rigor with clear documentation and developer experience improvements. Colleagues can expect a pragmatic engineer who focuses on durable design and subtle, high-impact refactors that reduce operational friction.
10 years of coding experience
BSc, Computer Science, First Class with Award, BSc, Computer Science, First Class with Award at University of Bristol
Automatically provision and manage TLS certificates in Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Contributions:3 releases, 449 reviews, 853 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Josh's contributions focused on adding and documenting features related to the core functionality of the cert-manager Kubernetes TLS certificate management system. Specifically, the user introduced new uninstall documentation, which improves the uninstall experience for users. The user also refactored existing code to remove a secret getter from a function for a more efficient design. Finally, they worked on the Ingress shim to check for common names.
Dapr is a portable, event-driven, runtime for building distributed applications across cloud and edge.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:938 reviews, 3 commits, 535 PRs in 6 days
Contributions summary:Josh's commits focused on improving the placement service within the Dapr project, primarily by addressing code quality and stability issues. These changes involved adding and updating API calls, and streamlining gRPC service connection and actor handling. A significant portion of their work centered on enhancements related to the state store, including features like custom error messages. They made adjustments to the internal state processing, indicating an effort to increase efficiency and robustness.
sidecarserverlessruntimeevent-drivenmicroservice
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Josh Van Leeuwen - Senior Software Engineer at diagridio