Vanessa Macdougal
Senior Software Engineer at HashiCorp
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolVanessa Macdougal is a Senior Software Engineer with 11+ years building high-performance, security-conscious systems across C/C++, Java, and Python, now contributing to Terraform Enterprise at HashiCorp. She has a strong track record of diagnosing and fixing hard reliability issues, delivering multi-threaded and kernel-level improvements, and driving order-of-magnitude performance wins in vulnerability management and remediation pipelines. Vanessa combines embedded and firmware experience with large-scale backend work—having improved boot times and reduced network traffic in device firmware and later optimized enterprise security products and databases. She’s comfortable across Windows, UNIX/Linux (including SELinux), and database ecosystems (Oracle, MySQL, Postgres), and routinely automates and monitors production health with tools like Datadog and PagerDuty. A former team lead and mentor, she pairs hands-on coding with customer-facing troubleshooting and platform analytics to prioritize impactful engineering. Her background from IBM to Rapid7 to HashiCorp reveals a rare mix of low-level systems expertise and security-minded cloud product development.
11 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Master's of Science Computer Engineering, Master's of Science Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at AustinBachelor of Science Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University
German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
982reputation
1.2mreached
47answers
6questions
Github Skills (17)
xml10
fingerprinting10
pattern-recognition9
hosts9
pattern9
regex9
ruby8
oracle6
database6
conditional-statements6
emacs6
windows6
indexing6
python6
nexpose6
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
vmacdougal-r7/recog
Jun 2017 - Jun 2017
Contributions:3 pushes, 2 branches in 1 day
hostspatternrecognitionpattern-recognition
rapid7/nexpose_java_api
Mar 2015 - Mar 2015
Contributions:5 commits, 3 PRs, 3 pushes in 8 days
apinexpose
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