Patrick Mcclurg
Software Engineer at Confidential AI (Previously Lunal)
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Mcclurg is a polyglot software engineer based in Zurich with 10 years of experience building resilient, large-scale distributed systems and startups. He has been a core maintainer of drand, a widely used distributed randomness beacon serving billions of requests monthly, and contributed critical stability fixes and CLI improvements to the Go daemon. Patrick combines hands-on backend engineering with leadership as a startup founder and CTO, delivering privacy-preserving and threshold cryptography products for cross-chain settlement and trusted execution environments. His background spans digital currency prototypes, DIDComm identity work, and JVM/Kotlin platforms, reflecting a rare mix of cryptography, systems reliability, and product-focused delivery. Trained in professional software development with earlier leadership formation at Sandhurst, he brings disciplined engineering and an operator’s mindset to hard distributed problems.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
BMus, Music, BMus, Music at Queen's University BelfastMaster of Science (MSc), Professional Software Development, Master of Science (MSc), Professional Software Development at Ulster UniversityMethodist College Belfast
German, English
Stackoverflow
123reputation
6kreached
4answers
6questions
Github Skills (20)
back-end-development10
go10
cryptography10
golang10
distributed-systems9
error-handling9
cli8
command-line-interface8
command-line8
testing8
jpql6
spring-data-jpa6
hibernate6
content-type6
specification6
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
drand/drand
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
🎲 A Distributed Randomness Beacon Daemon - Go implementation
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 527 reviews, 32 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to the core functionality and stability of the drand daemon. Their work included fixing segfaults related to node index issues during DKG and beacon processing. They also addressed issues causing panics on port binding failures and improved error messaging for resharing operations. Additionally, they made improvements related to the CLI, modifying flag behavior and correcting port selection during key generation.
golangcryptographydaemonrandomness-beaconbeacon
randa-mu/ssv-dkg
Oct 2023 - Feb 2025
A project to enable Distributed Key Generation for distributed validators using the SSV network
Contributions:25 reviews, 45 PRs, 106 pushes in 1 year 4 months
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