Michael Malone
Founder at Smallstep
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Malone is a founder and seasoned software leader with 17 years of experience building developer-focused infrastructure and security products from San Francisco. As founder of Smallstep since 2016 and former CTO of Betable, he blends hands-on engineering with product leadership to deliver secure, scalable systems—particularly in certificate management and automated TLS/SSH workflows. His open-source contributions to smallstep/certificates show practical DevOps and security chops, including Kubernetes automation, mTLS examples, and Go tooling. With a background stretching from systems administration at the US Naval Academy to lead architect roles at SimpleGeo, he combines operational discipline with startup grit and a knack for turning cryptographic primitives into usable developer tooling.
17 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Virginia Tech - Pamplin College of Business
Github Skills (19)
kubernetes10
tls1210
security-txt10
bash10
tls1310
security10
mtls10
automation10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
libtls10
automations10
devops10
security-scan10
acme9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
smallstep/certificates
Jan 2019 - Sep 2019
🛡️ A private certificate authority (X.509 & SSH) & ACME server for secure automated certificate management, so you can use TLS everywhere & SSO for SSH.
Role in this project:
DevOps & Security Engineer
DevOps & Security EngineerContributions:36 commits, 1 PR, 31 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on setting up and configuring the `autocert` tool, which includes automating certificate management within a Kubernetes environment. Their work involved writing shell scripts for initialization, modifying the `autocert.sh` script to check permissions, and implementing mTLS examples. They also integrated with and used Go to build tooling for this.
sshacme-serversecurecertificate-authoritysecurity-tools
simplegeo/goldengate
Aug 2010 - Aug 2010
Contributions:55 commits in 16 days
goldengategatewaykubernetescloud-gateway
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