Adam Rothman
Senior Staff Software Engineer ยท Security Architect
California, United States
Summary
Security engineer, operator, and architect with thirteen years of experience seeking new and exciting challenges. Expertise in design and implementation of security systems, infrastructure management, and incident response. Adept at mentoring teams, setting technical direction, and driving strategic security initiatives. Early adopter, fast learner, and general lover of technology.
Experience
Slack
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Security Operations
- Lead engineer and DRI for Uberproxy, a distributed reverse proxy that authenticates and authorizes access to thousands of internal services.
- Lead engineer and DRI for Slack's HashiCorp Vault deployments. Led migration from OSS Vault to Enterprise Vault. Designed and implemented redundant multi-region architecture with live replication for fast disaster recovery.
- Incident responder for both security and availability incidents. Served on the Major Incident Commander on-call rotation, which is tasked with directing response to high-severity incidents.
- Detectioneering project tech lead: project manager, technical advisor, and contributor to eBPF-based security sensor with advanced enrichment capabilities.
- Architecture Advisor: provide early feedback, via design review, to teams undertaking significant architectural changes.
- Mentor to engineers across Slack Security, with regularly scheduled 1-on-1s. Frequent RFC commenter, code reviewer, and project advisor.
- Promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer in Aug 2019; promoted to Senior Staff Engineer (Salesforce: L10 Architect) in Aug 2023.
Post Social
Founding Member and Backend Architect
- Designed and implemented backend service stack to support real-time messaging, user proximity detection, and geospatial feeds.
- Built versatile, performant REST and WebSocket APIs deployed on AWS for iOS, Android, and web clients.
- Developed a push notification gateway compatible with APNs, FCM, and AWS SNS; open-sourced underlying HTTP/2 client library.
- Advocated for and implemented features to protect user privacy and minimize collection of personal data.
- Administered corporate finances and managed vendors and contractors.
Jawbone
Senior Backend Software Engineer, Innovation Team
- Built and operated backend infrastructure for a developer SDK providing user presence detection via low-energy Bluetooth.
- Collaborated on the design and implementation of algorithms for secure, anonymous Bluetooth advertisement of user identity.
Yelp
Full-Stack Mobile Engineer, iOS and Backend
- Led development of a new service to manage ingestion and transcoding of user-uploaded video content.
- Led effort to localize iOS app for launch in Japan.
Yelp
Infrastructure Engineering Intern
- Designed and built dashboard aggregating availability data from backend services.
- Simplified backend module dependency graphs.
Meebo
Server-Side Engineering Intern
- Built iOS app to display recommended stories curated by content team.
- Contributed to backend software stack.
Education
Stanford University
B.S. in Computer Science
- Taught introductory Java as a CS106a section leader.
- Held break-out sessions, office hours, and exam reviews; graded assignments and exams.
Skills
Languages
Go, Rust, Python, Swift, Ruby
Tools
AWS, Terraform, Claude Code, Ansible, Vault, Nginx, Redis, SQL, Docker
Ask me about
My dog, food and wine, travel, video and tabletop games, building computers, collecting things