Nicolas Cohen
Senior Principal Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicolas Cohen is a Senior Principal Engineer in San Francisco with over 10 years of hands-on experience building and operating cloud-native infrastructure and deployment tooling. He has deep expertise in back-end systems, secret management, and Kubernetes integrations, demonstrated by substantial contributions to prominent open-source Spinnaker components like halyard, kork, and clouddriver. His career blends startup grit and enterprise scale—from founding Workfuze to leading engineering at Armory.io and now driving platform engineering at Palo Alto Networks. Nicolas is pragmatic about secure configuration and deployment patterns, having implemented secret engines (including S3-backed storage), encryption workflows, and Kubernetes secret delivery in production-grade projects. Known for focusing on reliability and operability, he often tackles the subtle orchestration gaps that cause outages, such as account reloading, caching, and probe configuration. He holds an MS from the National School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of Grenoble and pairs formal training with decades of systems-level problem solving.
10 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
MS, MS at National School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of Grenoble
French, English
Github Skills (27)
kubernetes10
secret-management10
java10
javas10
secrets-manager10
aws10
amazon-s310
kubernetes-pods10
spring-boot10
yaml10
aws-s310
spinnaker10
devops10
hal10
s3-bucket10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
spinnaker/kork
Jan 2019 - Dec 2020
Kork provides some basic service building blocks for Spinnaker.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 10 commits, 10 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Nicolas primarily focused on developing secret management features within the kork project. Their contributions involved creating a storage secret engine, including S3 implementation, and integrating it with the existing kork framework. They also added a Noop secret engine for testing purposes. Furthermore, the user worked on ensuring that the secret manager is loaded before Tomcat properties, improving the overall system initialization.
javabuilding-blocksspinnaker
spinnaker/clouddriver
Jan 2019 - Mar 2021
read and write operations across cloud providers
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:42 reviews, 27 commits, 34 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Nicolas primarily focused on improving the Kubernetes integration within the Spinnaker clouddriver project. Their commits addressed critical bug fixes related to Kubernetes server group management, account reloading, and dynamic configuration updates. They also made changes to caching agents and SQL table name handling. Furthermore, they contributed to improving the CloudFoundry and Artifact functionality by implementing kork-credentials, updating the code with the latest and up-to-date information.
gcpproviderscloudcloud-providersazure
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