Summary
Trevor Dunlap is a Principal Researcher at Chainguard with eight years of experience bridging applied research and production engineering in cloud-native and data-driven systems. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from NC State and moved from graduate research to industry roles at Chainguard after an earlier research internship there, signaling a strong mix of academic rigor and practical impact. His background includes building .NET Core applications, Microsoft BI data platforms, and real-time pipelines with Kafka, NiFi, and Spark, as well as hands-on work in R, Python, C++, and Scala from earlier Big Data and IoT projects. Trevor’s career also spans retail forecasting analytics and software engineering at LendingTree, demonstrating an ability to translate research insights into business-facing systems. He brings a researcher’s curiosity to security-focused supply chain tooling at Chainguard while retaining deep data engineering and performance-tuning expertise. Outside core engineering, his early experience leading robotics camps and long-running client-facing modeling work hint at a knack for explaining complex systems and collaborating across diverse teams.
7 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering at University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at North Carolina State University
High School Education, High School Education at North Moore High School