# Tao Bojlén (@btao.org)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/btao.org
Headline: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, GB

## About

I'm an experienced engineer focused on building great products that have a meaningful impact on the world. I care about simplicity, scale, and working with great teams. I've worked on platform engineering for large-scale data systems, data-intensive frontends, cloud/AWS infrastructure, and team leadership and mentorship.

## Experience

- **Senior Software Engineer at Cinder** (2022 – 2024)
- **Staff Software Engineer at Cinder** (2024 – 2025)
  Cinder is making the Internet a safer place through its end-to-end Trust & Safety platform. As one of the first hires, I led our Platform team and architected & built foundational features from zero to one. Examples include a graph-based data foundation handling 1B nodes/20M events per day, automated workflows, robust CI/CD and incident-management process.
- **Senior Software Engineer at Intruder** (2020 – 2022)
  Intruder makes a vulnerability scanner with a focus on user-friendly results.
  \- Led the development of the frontend, including a migration to modern Vue.js.
  \- Managed and mentored two engineers, supporting their progression to senior roles.
  \- Created a public log4j vulnerability mini-site that drew 300K visitors and resulted in Wall Street Journal coverage.
- **Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies** (2017 – 2018)
  \- Led development of data integration pipelines and frontend tools for a government client in Denmark.
  \- Deployed software that significantly improved privacy controls over citizens’ data.

## Education

- **The University of Edinburgh** — MSc, Cyber Security, Privacy, and Trust (2019 – 2020)
- **The University of Edinburgh** — BSc (Hons), Cognitive Science (2013 – 2017)

## Skills

- Software Architecture
- Technical Leadership
- Java
- Vue.js
- Ruby on Rails
- Mentoring
- Cybersecurity
- Big Data
- Team Leadership
- DevOps
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Python (Programming Language)
- Kubernetes
- Django
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- React.js
- Full-Stack Development
- Terraform
- System Architecture
- Node.js
- Elixir

## Projects

- **Shroud.email** — https://shroud.email
  An email forwarding service with a focus on privacy and tracker blocking.
- **fediverse.space**
  fediverse.space was a tool for visualizing & analyzing decentralized social networks. This open-source project received funding from the NLnet Foundation.

## Publications

- The forge we deserve — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-05-09-the-forge-we-deserve)
- Announcing: Parrot.garden — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-03-22-parrots)
- Just one more prompt — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-03-18-one-more-prompt)
- The Normie Loop — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-03-11-normie-loop)
- Everything changes, and nothing changes — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-02-28-everything-changes-nothing-changes)
- Introducing RSS-O-Matic — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-02-25-rss-o-matic)
- On Burnout — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2026-01-16-on-burnout)
- How to get hired at a startup — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2025-11-23-how-to-get-hired-at-a-startup)
- The AI Outrage Machine — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2025-10-23-outrage-machine)
- Chesterton's Fence is no more — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2025-10-13-chestertons-fence)
- The best productivity system that's ever existed — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2025-03-15-productivity)
- Column- and row-oriented databases — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2023-07-02-row-and-columnar)
- Bloom filters — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2023-07-01-bloom-filters)
- Don't filter in Django's qet_queryset — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2023-01-19-filtering-django-get-queryset)
- "The right tool for the job" — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2022-01-08-the-right-tool-for-the-job)
- npm install is curl | bash — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2021-09-09-npm-install-is-curl-bash)
- A web of trust for npm — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-10-02-npm-trust)
- Literature review: Routing attacks on Tor — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-08-12-routing-attacks-tor)
- Reasons not to use Telegram — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-06-07-against-telegram)
- Feel-good security in ProtonMail — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-06-01-feel-good-security)
- On mixing plaintext and encrypted messages — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-05-28-sometimes-on-security)
- Running ElasticSearch in podman on Fedora 32 — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2020-04-20-elasticsearch-podman)
- Books I enjoyed in 2019 — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2019-12-31-reading)
- fediverse.space awarded NGI Zero grant — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2019-08-22-fediverse-space-nlnet)
- Self and Lack Thereof: On Kierkegaard and Capitalism — btao.org (https://btao.org/posts/2016-08-31-kierkegaard-capitalism)

## Volunteering

- Retail Volunteer – Bookshop at Amnesty International
- Program Committee at TrustCon

## Languages

- Danish (native)
- English (native)