Nicky Semenza
Senior Systems Engineer at Cloudflare
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicky Semenza is a Senior Systems Engineer and full-stack developer with 12 years of experience building and hardening backend systems, currently working on Cloudflare’s SSL/TLS and PKI infrastructure. He combines deep Go and DevOps expertise—modernizing builds, CI/CD, and observability for open-source projects like redoctober and CFSSL—with hands-on production work managing certificate issuance and mTLS at scale. Based in San Francisco, he has a proven track record of improving database integrations, Prometheus metrics, and deployment pipelines for high-security tooling. Outside engineering he’s a practiced photographer who documented collegiate sports and events, a creative detail that informs his pragmatic yet design-aware approach to systems. His background includes startups and internships where he built backend APIs and full-stack apps from the ground up, giving him both product sensibility and operational rigor.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science at Purdue UniversityHigh School, High School at The Harker School
English
Github Skills (15)
dependency-management10
github-ci10
go10
githubaction-workflow10
mysql10
cicd10
database-design9
sentry9
prometheus8
testing8
libtls7
tls137
pki7
mtls7
tls127
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
cloudflare/redoctober
Oct 2020 - Oct 2021
Go server for two-man rule style file encryption and decryption.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 7 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Nicky primarily focused on modernizing the project's build and dependency management. This included migrating from `dep` to `go mod`, upgrading dependencies, and integrating Go version 1.16. The user also replaced Travis CI with GitHub Actions for continuous integration and continuous deployment. Further contributions involved refactoring the project's sentry integration.
decryptionfile-encryptiongo-server
cloudflare/cfssl
Sep 2020 - Dec 2022
CFSSL: Cloudflare's PKI and TLS toolkit
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 14 reviews, 63 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nicky primarily focused on enhancing the `cfssl` project, a PKI and TLS toolkit. Their work involved adding features to the certificate database (`certdb`) such as storing additional metadata and handling null values for columns. Furthermore, the user made updates to the MySQL connection code and incorporated Prometheus metrics, signifying improvements in database interaction and monitoring capabilities. Several commits included addressing dependencies, CI/CD processes and handling testing infrastructure.
cfsslcloudflarepki
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