Philip Conrad
Software Engineer at Open Policy Agent
Columbia, South Carolina Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhilip Conrad is a software engineer with 13 years of experience who blends compiler and embedded-systems research with practical engineering to build robust, user-focused software. He earned a master’s in computer science and spent six years as a graduate researcher working on compilers, FPGAs, and embedded systems before moving into production compiler and policy-engine work. At Styra and as an ongoing contributor to the widely used Open Policy Agent project, he helped evolve the Rego language—implementing new built-ins, improving performance and memory efficiency, and shipping AWS SigV4 and GraphQL-related functionality. His recent roles include building enterprise policy tooling and interpreter/compiler tech, and he now continues his engineering career at Apple. Notably, he combines deep systems-level expertise with open-source stewardship, often surfacing subtle correctness and efficiency fixes that improve stability for large-scale policy deployments.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at University of South Carolina
Stackoverflow
1,471reputation
94kreached
12answers
3questions
gcc
top-5%
Github Skills (18)
authorizations10
wpgraphql10
go10
rego10
wordpress-graphql10
authorization10
graphql10
json-patch9
gcc9
aws9
performance-optimization9
pointer6
memory-alignment6
unroll6
open-policy-agent6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
open-policy-agent/opa
May 2022 - Jan 2023
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open source, general-purpose policy engine.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:462 reviews, 61 commits, 145 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Philip contributed extensively to the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project, focusing on enhancing and optimizing the Rego language and its built-in functions. They implemented new built-in functions for units parsing, GraphQL schema validation, and AWS SigV4 signing, improving functionality and usability. The user also refactored existing built-ins, like set unions and object unions, for improved performance and memory efficiency, along with fixing critical bugs in the codebase, improving the overall stability of the OPA project.
policycompliancedogepoliciescloud-native
StyraInc/opa-csharp
Mar 2024 - Mar 2025
The Styra-supported driver to connect via C# to Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Enterprise OPA deployments
Contributions:82 reviews, 187 PRs, 193 pushes in 1 year
opaopen-policy-agentsdk-csharpsdk-dotnetsdk-net
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.