Sam Dacanay
Staff Software Engineer at Chainguard
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Dacanay is a Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years building and leading teams that deliver secure, scalable distributed systems across cloud-native stacks. He has deep hands-on expertise in Java, Python, Go, containers/kubernetes, and AWS/GCP, and has repeatedly moved systems from startup to enterprise scale while maintaining operational rigor. At LogicMonitor he grew an engineering team from 3 to 17 during a Vista-era transition, and at MixMode he architected a big-data ingestion pipeline that handled 100+ GB/sec and contributed custom Helm tooling for a multi-million-dollar defense contract. At Anchore and in open-source work on projects like Grype and Syft he focused on container security, SBOM ingestion, CLI UX, and data consistency—improving both usability and security posture. Currently advancing software supply-chain security at Chainguard and NetBox Labs, he blends managerial experience with day-to-day backend and DevOps contributions. Collected across roles, his track record shows a pragmatic mix of architecture, secure-by-design implementation, and a penchant for solving high-scale, high-risk problems.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara
Spanish
Github Skills (30)
json10
container10
docker10
python10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
vulnerability-scanners10
testing10
sbom10
dockers10
go10
api10
golang10
scanning10
cli10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
anchore/anchore-engine
Aug 2020 - Jun 2022
A service that analyzes docker images and scans for vulnerabilities
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:107 reviews, 84 commits, 105 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to the back-end aspects of the Anchore Engine, focusing on account management, image analysis, and archive functionalities. They made changes to the database models and API controllers to prevent disabling or deleting the admin account, along with refactoring code for clarity. They also worked on image analysis, modifying timestamp overrides and refining the code to handle potential conflicts. The user's contributions include fixing documentation and improving exception handling in the application.
containerspythondocker-imagedockerhubvulnerabilities
anchore/grype
Sep 2020 - Oct 2021
A vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 7 commits, 9 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Sam primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality of the Grype vulnerability scanner. Their work included implementing shell completion for the CLI using Cobra, which involved interacting with Docker for image listing, and fixing JSON key casing for consistent data presentation. Furthermore, they added support for directory SBOM ingestion and improved logging. These contributions indicate a strong focus on improving usability, integration, and data handling within the project.
security-vulnerabilityfilesystemsvulnerability-scannersocivulnerabilities
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