Ryan Heffernan
Software Engineer at Smack Technologies Inc.
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Heffernan is a software engineer with a decade of experience building backend systems and contributing to high-impact projects across defense, cloud, and open-source ecosystems. He holds a BS in Computer Science with a Data and AI concentration from RPI and has translated academic work in neuroscience-adjacent coursework into pragmatic software solutions. Past roles include SDE work at AWS on the Chime Identity team and engineering positions at Lockheed Martin and Smack Technologies, where he focused on robust, production-grade implementations. An active open-source contributor, he improved Windows registry handling and added globbing and new telemetry tables to the widely used osquery project, reducing crash surface and expanding query flexibility. Comfortable across multiple languages and memory-safe patterns (e.g., unique_ptr refactors), he combines systems-level thinking with a product-minded approach to ship reliable features. Based in Los Angeles, he is pursuing SDE1-level opportunities where he can blend backend engineering, observability, and AI-inflected data work.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Github Skills (6)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
sql10
osquery10
security9
system-programming9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
osquery/osquery
Mar 2017 - Jun 2017
SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 38 PRs, 13 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Windows registry table within the osquery project. They made significant changes to the `registry.cpp` file, including incorporating unique pointers for memory management and improving the handling of registry data types, specifically addressing potential crashes with `REG_NONE` types. Furthermore, they implemented globbing support for the Windows registry table, enabling more flexible queries, and added functionality to allow querying by the 'path' column. They also added Windows Startup info table and IE Extensions table features.
instrumentationanalyticsoperating-systemsecuritysql
ryanheffernan/osquery
Mar 2017 - Jun 2017
Contributions:97 pushes, 40 branches in 3 months
instrumentationanalyticsoperating-systemsqloperating
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