Patrick O'doherty
Member Of Technical Staff at Tailscale
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick O'doherty is a seasoned security-focused backend engineer with 14 years of experience building reliable, production-grade systems and developer tools. Currently a Member of Technical Staff at Tailscale in San Francisco, he previously helped shape authorization tooling at Oso and led security engineering efforts at Intercom. He specializes in back-end systems, debugging and hardening web services (notably work on tsweb, safeweb, and WireGuard/2FA integrations) and improving policy validation and error handling in open-source projects like oso. Patrick pairs pragmatic engineering with security-first thinking, routinely contributing fixes that tighten validation, improve observability, and simplify deployment across diverse environments including NixOS and RPM-based systems. An Irish polymath off-hours—photographer, musician and electronics tinkerer—he brings a maker’s curiosity to complex infrastructure problems and a track record of turning subtle bugs and compatibility issues into robust, maintainable solutions.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Gonzaga College SJ
Github Skills (29)
python10
testing10
http10
security10
go10
aws10
error-handling10
terraform9
terraformer9
serverless9
docker8
apidoc8
api8
github-api8
nixos8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
osohq/oso
Oct 2021 - Aug 2022
Oso is a batteries-included framework for building authorization in your application.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:107 reviews, 37 commits, 49 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to the core logic and validation checks of the `oso` library, focusing on improving error messages, rule validation, and overall policy evaluation. Their work involved refactoring existing code, adding new checks for undefined rules and resource blocks, and implementing suggested type specializers. The user also contributed to debugging functionalities of the project.
logic-programmingpythonbatteriesosoruby
tailscale/tailscale
Oct 2022 - Mar 2025
The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:36 reviews, 38 PRs, 64 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily focused on back-end development tasks, specifically related to the `tsweb` module, which appears to handle web server functionality. Their contributions involved debugging and adapting the code to the Go 1.22.0 syntax, and then reverting and re-implementing the changes to fix incompatibilities. The user also worked on disabling auto-updates on NixOS installations and implementing security features in the `safeweb` package. Additional contributions include adding a GPG key import for RPM installations and implementing CORS support for the openid-configuration endpoint.
secureprivacysecurityvpnwireguard
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