Nick Khyl
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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RockstarMykola K is a seasoned software engineer with 11+ years of hands-on experience building endpoint management, security, and networking solutions, currently contributing as a Member of Technical Staff at Tailscale. He brings deep expertise in Windows internals, kernel- and user-mode programming, C++, assembly, reverse engineering, and PKI-driven security design, with a track record of shipping enterprise-grade products used on millions of endpoints. At PolicyPak he led a 15-person team to build least-privilege and privilege-management frameworks, kernel drivers, and cross-platform compatibility efforts, and at Ecentria he created a novel 3D warehouse visualization and DSL-driven code/data flow tools. His open-source work on the well-known Tailscale project focused on Windows networking, DLL build processes, DNS/firewall improvements, and hardening against race conditions and memory leaks. Comfortable bridging low-level systems work with product and team leadership, he’s equally adept at refactoring legacy components and designing forward-looking security architectures. Based in Chicago, he’s pursuing roles that combine deep systems security with practical product delivery.
11 years of coding experience
Github Skills (10)
go10
dns10
system-design10
vpn10
firewall-rules10
wireguard10
architecture9
architectures9
system9
automated-tests8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
tailscale/tailscale
Dec 2023 - Apr 2025
The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:2 releases, 391 reviews, 195 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily worked on back-end system enhancements and refactoring, with a focus on improving the stability and security of the Tailscale VPN. Their contributions involved modifications to the build process for Windows DLLs, Windows networking components, and network-level DNS configuration, including implementing enhanced firewall rules. Furthermore, they addressed potential issues in the Tailscale code related to race conditions, memory leaks, and security issues. These contributions suggest involvement in various aspects of software architecture and design.
secureprivacysecurityvpnwireguard
tailscale/json
Oct 2024 - Dec 2024
Experimental implementation of a proposed v2 encoding/json package
Contributions:2 pushes, 2 branches in 2 months
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