Paul Hinze
Founding Engineer at Miren
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Hinze is a founding engineer and seasoned software leader with 19 years of experience building cloud-native infrastructure, developer tooling, and platform engineering teams. He spent a decade-plus at HashiCorp driving Terraform’s platform and provider stability—contributing to core projects like Terraform, HCL, and widely used tools such as Vagrant—where his work improved build systems, parsing robustness, and provider lifecycle correctness. Paul blends hands-on backend and DevOps expertise with engineering leadership, having moved from individual contributor roles into director and VP positions before recent founding and management roles at Tailscale and Miren. He’s comfortable across CI/CD, testing, provider SDKs, and cloud provider edge cases (notably GCP, AWS, DigitalOcean), and often focuses on making infrastructure code more resilient and testable. Based in Chicago, he’s also a Terra.do Climate Fellow, signaling an interest in applying technical skill to climate challenges. Colleagues know him for quietly fixing hard corner cases in large open-source systems while scaling teams that own them.
19 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Climate Fellow, Climate Fellow at Terra.doBachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at Marquette University
Stackoverflow
2,327reputation
56kreached
8answers
1question
testing
top-1%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (62)
google-cloud-platform10
parser10
testing10
hcl10
digitalocean10
bash10
go-testing10
web-content10
cicd10
terraform10
gcp10
terraformer10
infrastructure10
go10
aws10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
hashicorp/terraform-plugin-sdk
Jan 2015 - Sep 2018
Terraform Plugin SDK enables building plugins (providers) to manage any service providers or custom in-house solutions
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:564 commits, 1 issue in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily worked on the core infrastructure of the Terraform Plugin SDK. Their contributions focused on addressing testing issues related to schema differences in various data types such as floats, sets, and maps. The user also contributed to internal testing, refactoring the build and testing infrastructure to reduce code duplication. Several commits targeted core features such as handling of defaults, applying schema validation to a wider scope, and handling of destroyed resources, while adding documentation to match.
housegrpcproviderssdkterraform-plugin
hashicorp/terraform
Jan 2015 - Sep 2021
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:7 releases, 1327 commits, 932 PRs in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the AWS infrastructure for the Terraform project. Their work included resolving issues in the AWS RDS database instance setup and addressing problems with AWS SQS queues and KMS key ARNs. The user also implemented fixes related to Terraform's handling of resource destruction and code structure in the AWS and Heroku providers.
versionedconfiguration-filescloud-managementawscloud
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