TJ Saunders
Maintainer, Core Developer at The ProFTPD Project
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTJ Saunders is a seasoned maintainer and core developer with 25 years building high-traffic, low-latency application servers and distributed services from Unix/POSIX roots to modern cloud microservices. Based in Portland, he blends deep protocol and cryptography expertise (notably contributions to OpenSSL and longstanding work on ProFTPD) with practical SRE and service-engineering leadership at companies like Tesla, Netflix, and Lyve. He designs and implements scalable systems across the stack—HTTP/WebSocket, TLS/SSH, databases, and async Scala/Java services—while championing testing, CI, and operability. TJ’s rare combination of protocol-level bug fixes and feature work (e.g., TLS session ticket and serverinfo improvements) paired with decades as an open-source project maintainer means he equally values rigorous security hygiene and shipping usable features. He’s as comfortable refactoring C crypto internals as mentoring teams on reliable 24x7 production services.
25 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree History Physics, Bachelor's degree History Physics at University of Washington
Stackoverflow
3,037reputation
391kreached
90answers
0questions
ftp
top-5%
Github Skills (28)
ss10
security-hardening10
ssl10
sslv310
c-programming10
c1110
c1710
openssl10
cryptography10
network-security10
sftp10
encryption10
data-structure9
algorithm9
algorithms9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
proftpd/proftpd
May 2014 - Jan 2023
ProFTPD source code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:40 releases, 99 reviews, 4031 commits in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:TJ primarily focused on improving the security and robustness of the ProFTPD server. Their contributions involved adding regression tests to ensure proper handling of FEAT response lines and file uploads, as well as addressing potential vulnerabilities related to SSH key handling and control connection behavior. The user also enhanced the handling of TLS session tickets and OpenSSH-specific key formats. Additionally, the user contributed to the implementation of various SFTP features.
unixposixftpssftp-serversftp
openssl/openssl
Dec 2015 - Apr 2020
TLS/SSL and crypto library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 PRs, 27 comments, 2 issues in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:TJ primarily contributed to the OpenSSL library, focusing on the TLS/SSL implementation. Their work involved fixing bugs and adding features related to session tickets and serverinfo extensions. The contributions included refactoring code to use `sizeof` for various fields, implementing new APIs for setting signature values, and improving the default encryption algorithms for TLS session tickets. The user also addressed documentation and argument ordering issues.
crypto-librarycryptographyssltlscrypto
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