Ryan Gerstenkorn
Software Engineer at The Cavvy
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Gerstenkorn is a Seattle-based software engineer with a decade of experience building secure, scalable cloud and DevOps tooling, specializing in AWS, Terraform, Go, and Python. He’s led cloud penetration testing at Rhino Security Labs and contributed significant maintenance and feature work to well-known open-source projects like Pacu and CloudGoat, improving AWS exploitation tooling and Terraform compatibility. Prior roles at Brave, SailPoint, Twitch/Curse, and Amazon show deep operational ownership—migrating critical update infrastructure, designing resilient networks, and automating CI/CD at scale. A top 1% HackerOne contributor and active bug bounty hunter, he pairs offensive security insight with pragmatic engineering. He also builds developer-focused automation and release systems, and is launching entrepreneurial projects including an equine marketplace and ongoing freelance work. Outside typical resumes, his GitHub shows playful creativity alongside CloudSec focus, hinting at a personality that blends curiosity with meticulous technical craft.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Sehome High SchoolWhatcom Community College
Github Skills (27)
docker10
boto10
python10
testing10
dockers10
terraform10
cicd10
terraformer10
aws10
build-automation10
devops10
scripting9
penetration-testing9
security9
browser9
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
RhinoSecurityLabs/cloudgoat
Apr 2021 - Jun 2022
CloudGoat is Rhino Security Labs' "Vulnerable by Design" AWS deployment tool
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:34 reviews, 58 commits, 48 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the project by updating and supporting the deployment tool, CloudGoat, across different Terraform versions. They modified Terraform configuration files to ensure compatibility with Terraform 0.15, including changes to output handling and the `destroy` command. Additionally, the user made improvements to the ECS takeover scenario, simplifying and optimizing the deployment process by removing unnecessary components and adding placement constraints. They also fixed help output and altered the behavior of the 'create' command.
vulnerableaws-deploymentdeploymentsecuritydeployment-tool
RhinoSecurityLabs/pacu
Dec 2020 - Feb 2022
The AWS exploitation framework, designed for testing the security of Amazon Web Services environments.
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 84 reviews, 72 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ryan's primary contributions involved improving the codebase's maintainability and reliability through dependency management, linting, and testing enhancements. They removed unnecessary dependencies, set lower bounds on others, and implemented a GitHub Action for linting and testing. The user also introduced new methods for handling boto3 sessions and configurations, improving the tool's AWS interaction capabilities. Moreover, they added a module for downloading EBS snapshots and fixed multiple issues related to the functionality of the tool.
pythonsecurityamazontestingpenetration-testing
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