Nathan Ostrowski
Co-Founder at Petra Security (YC W24)
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolNathan Ostrowski is a security-focused founder and engineer with eight years of experience building offensive security tooling, ML-driven vulnerability detectors, and full-stack products from early startups to enterprise teams. As co-founder of Petra Security (YC W24) and formerly CTO/co-founder of Octane Security, he led development of machine learning systems to surface critical smart-contract bugs and now steers a new startup in the blockchain security space. His background includes hands-on smart contract auditing at OtterSec—working with Rust and Anchor for major Solana ecosystem players—and offensive research at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 where he built covert protocols and red-team tooling. Earlier roles span product engineering and growth at YC-backed Glimpse and applied research at Duke, where he designed novel homomorphic-encryption approaches for private information retrieval. Comfortable across languages and stacks, Nathan blends deep security research with product instincts, often turning academic techniques into practical, auditable tools. Based in San Francisco, he pairs startup grit with a track record of shipping impactful security systems for high-risk blockchain and cloud environments.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
North Carolina School of Science and MathematicsBachelor's degree Computer Science Philosophy, Bachelor's degree Computer Science Philosophy at Duke University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (51)
retrieval9
summarization9
text-generation9
squad9
information-retrieval9
question-answering9
korean-nlp9
transfer-learning9
nlp9
python8
haystack8
transformer-models8
huggingface-transformers8
generative-ai8
ai8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
nateostro/MuseumViewer
May 2020 - Aug 2020
Contributions:9 commits, 8 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
nateostro/message-book
Mar 2024 - Feb 2025
make a book from imessages
Contributions:8 pushes in 11 months
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