Michael Coyne is a senior software architect with 15 years of experience building secure, production-grade systems from 0 to 1 and scaling them across startups and enterprise teams. Based in New York, he has held leadership roles from CTO to VP of Engineering and currently shapes security-first architecture at Huntress while advising Publicist. A hands-on engineer and frequent contributor to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, his open-source work includes hardening Rails' encryption and cookie handling and adding signature verification to Stripe webhook integrations—demonstrating a deep focus on cryptography, secure comparisons, and key rotation. Known for translating ambiguous product ideas into auditable technical designs, he blends practical security engineering with product sensibility and a mathematics-and-CS background.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics and Computer Science at Towson University
Contributions:10 commits, 8 PRs, 98 comments in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on enhancing the security and functionality of the Ruby on Rails framework. Their contributions include fixing potential vulnerabilities related to AEAD encryption within the `MessageEncryptor` class, addressing issues in cookie handling and implementing key rotation mechanisms. They also modernized cookie storage tests to leverage encrypted cookies, reflecting a focus on secure data handling practices. Their work involved significant changes to the `activesupport` and `actionpack` directories.
Stripe webhook integration for Rails applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Contributions:6 commits, 2 PRs, 7 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Michael focused on implementing security features for the Stripe webhook integration. They added functionality to verify webhook signatures, a critical security measure. The commits also included adding tests to ensure proper signature verification and using secure comparison methods for authentication. This work enhanced the security and robustness of the application by preventing unauthorized access and data tampering.
striperails-applicationsrailsrubywebhook
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Michael Coyne - Senior Software Architect at Huntress