ADAM ROTHMAN
SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Adam Rothman

Senior Staff Software Engineer · Security Architect

San Francisco, California

01 / SUMMARY

Security engineer, operator, and architect with 15 years of experience designing and running the systems that protect critical infrastructure. Deep expertise in authentication, authorization, and identity; secrets management; and incident response. Track record of driving complex, ambiguous initiatives from ideation to production and mentoring engineers across an organization. Early adopter, fast learner, and lifelong lover of technology.

02 / EXPERIENCE

Slack

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Security Operations

San Francisco, CA & RemoteSep 2018 - Jul 2026
  • Lead engineer and DRI for Uberproxy, a globally distributed reverse proxy that authenticates and authorizes access for Slack's ~3,600 employees to thousands of internal services. Uberproxy handles over 1 billion requests/week and ~10,000 req/s at peak across 4 AWS regions.
  • Lead engineer and DRI for Slack's HashiCorp Vault deployments (largest manages ~250K secrets across 180+ secret engines at ~7M requests/day). Led the migration from OSS to Enterprise Vault to unblock Slack's FedRAMP Moderate and High authorizations. Designed and implemented multi-region replication topology to dramatically reduce disaster-recovery time.
  • Frequent incident responder and sometimes commander, including tours on the Major Incident Commander on-call rotation. Direct and participate in cross-functional response to high-severity security and availability incidents.
  • Served as initial tech lead for an eBPF-based runtime security sensor with advanced event-enrichment capabilities; acted as project manager, technical advisor, and contributor. Transitioned the tech lead role to the project's lead engineer, a mentee, for subsequent phases.
  • Architecture Advisor providing early design-review feedback to teams undertaking significant architectural changes.
  • Mentor to engineers across Slack Security through regular 1-on-1s, RFC review, code review, and project advising.
  • Promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer in August 2019. Promoted again to Senior Staff Engineer / L10 Architect in August 2023.

Post Social

Founding Member and Backend Architect

Oakland, CAOct 2015 - July 2018
  • 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

San Francisco, CAJan 2015 - Sep 2015
  • 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

San Francisco, CASep 2012 - Jan 2015
  • 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

San Francisco, CAJune 2012 - Sep 2012
  • Built a dashboard aggregating availability data across backend services and simplified backend module dependency graphs.

Meebo

Software Engineering Intern

Mountain View, CAJune 2011 - Sep 2011
  • Built an iOS app surfacing story recommendations curated by the content team and contributed to the backend software stack.

03 / EDUCATION

Stanford University

B.S. in Computer Science

Palo Alto, CA2009 - 2013
  • Taught introductory Java as a CS106a section leader.
  • Held break-out sessions, office hours, and exam reviews; graded assignments and exams.

04 / SKILLS

LanguagesGo, Rust, Python, Swift, Ruby
ToolsAWS, Terraform, Claude Code, Ansible, Vault, Nginx, Redis, SQL, Docker
Ask me aboutMy dog, food and wine, travel, video and tabletop games, homelab, building computers, collecting things