Danne Stayskal

Danne is an engineer.

Her software runs 3% of the Internet, 1.3% of the world economy, and has saved millions of lives. She invented a new kind of computer that made history for a NASA aircraft.
Her name rhymes with "can of playful".

She builds mission-critical technology.

Contact her at danne@stayskal.com.

Danne lives with her family and is active in her church on Orcas Island.
Outside work, she's a musician, Certified Personal Trainer, and Registered Yoga Teacher.

Istari Digital: Architect & Distinguished Engineer

. Invented a new kind of distributed computer to improve air and spacecraft safety and carbon efficiency. Enabled its users to write programs across everything they have access to without needing to trust any system in the process or move any sensitive data off-network. Programmed this "compute mesh" for US Air Force to create the market for digital airworthiness certification. Ran the first known zero-trust and zero-knowledge digital threads for model-based systems engineering. Designed all system components and led development and operations.

Zero-Trust, Zero-Knowledge, Cross-Domain, Digital Threading, SpiceDB

Patents: 12248740 (US), 20240419833 (US), 20250111014 (US), 20250131453 (US), 20250190607 (US), 2025137657 (WIPO)

Stripe: Staff Engineer

. Designed, prototyped, and handed off data system that securely stores all third party customer data. Launched Stripe's App Store on time, spec, and budget. Found and closed a severe vulnerability in the system that processes all bank account numbers. Closed all security, reliability, compliance, availability, latency, and efficiency issues across all customer-facing platform surfaces. Designed and launched authoritative internal knowledge platform. Held the maximum-escalation pager for all maximum-severity incidents across all services at the entire company.

Ruby, FEMA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, HADR

Humanistic Management Center: Delegate to United Nations
Forums on Business and Human Rights

. Attended United Nations forum as an on-site delegate of the NGO. Presented research on computational meta-ethics. Discussed AI safety and privacy in international forums.

Oracle Cloud: Principal Engineer & Architect

. Launched first Oracle Cloud region. Closed all console vulnerabilities, and ten others in other services. Programmed Oracle's root yubikey and wrote library that programmed all the others. Designed and launched the identity provider that safeguards all Oracle Cloud production resources. Wrote Oracle Cloud's architecture document template. Built cross-tenancy operator access functionality. Designed phonebook and service registry.

Wrote Oracle Cloud's standards for user interfaces, cryptography, and sensitive data handling. Built and maintained the authentication and authorization libraries that protect all cloud interfaces. Developed cloud account recovery and multi-factor authentication functions. Closed all accessibility gaps on public-facing interfaces. Federated all user and developer interfaces to all cloud services, giving service teams full-stack ownership of their products. Designed and launched Oracle Cloud's Free Tier in eight weeks, creating System Tags platform in the process.

Designed Oracle Cloud Realms. Invented and launched cross-realm cryptography, allowing Oracle to safely coordinate change across realms. Developed guidelines for intent-driven interfaces. Wrote guidelines and exercises for technical mentoring. Ensured the US government outscaled coronavirus with load validation tests for all public-facing US Covid support systems. Simulated sustained rate of one-third of the United States logging in per hour.

Designed distributed caching service. Consulted on design of search indexing, wide-column, and relational storage services. Designed Oracle Cloud's 5G service architecture. Represented Oracle to telecommunications customers. Vetted all service team region build automation systems designs. Provided architectural direction and boundaries to compute capacity request board.

Gave presentations on how to be an effective architect, mentoring and role modeling inclusive behavior, and on leveling the playing field for women in technology. Led more architecture reviews than any other lead reviewer. Provided guidance to Engineering Roadmap Assessment program, Developer Central, and the Engineering Community. Wrote Oracle Cloud quantum crypto deck for the office of the CEO.

Java, Clojure, TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Redis, Oracle DB, OpenSearch, U2F, OpenID

Patents: 11582030 (US,WIPO), 12095755 (US, WIPO), 20240211308 (US), 20230171233 (US), 2023132997 (US), 20240346129 (US)
  • US Patent 11582030: Secure distribution of entropy. Stayskal, Danne.
  • US Patent 12095755: Techniques for simultaneously accessing multiple isolated systems while maintaining security boundaries. Stayskal, Danne; Cabildo, Vladimir; Reyes Salas, Jorge.
  • US Patent 20240211308: Management plane orchestration across service cells. Hurley, Gabriel; Stayskal, Danne.
  • US Patent 20230171233: Secure transfer of workloads across security regions. Stayskal, Danne; Schumaker, Bob.
  • WIPO Patent 2023132997: Quorum-based authorization. Stayskal, Danne; Vogel, Dan.
  • US Patent 20240346129: Authorization brokering. Vogel, Dan, Stayskal, Danne.
Invited Talks
  • Leveling the Playing Field for Women in Engineering, Oracle Cloud Brown Bag, Seattle, 2020.
  • Strategies for Effective Engineering Across Organizational Boundaries, Oracle Cloud Architecture Conference, Seattle, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
  • Mentoring and Role-Modeling Inclusive Behavior, Oracle Cloud Architecture Conference, Seattle, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
  • Emotional Communication Design Patterns, Oracle Cloud, Seattle, 2018 and 2019.

Virtru: Independent Contractor

. Built secure and scalable software and systems to process email traffic.

NodeJS, JavaScript, Stanford JCL, Haraka

Evident: Artificial Intelligence Engineer

. Built an early AWS cloud vulnerability scanning startup. Developed and maintained software to secure customer AWS clusters through automated security scans of compute, load balancer, and configuration management systems. Kept vulnerability scanners up to date with leading threats. Build and led a distributed data science team.

Ruby, Rails, AWS, Sidekiq, Rspec, Agile, R, Python, Elastic MapReduce, Hadoop, PostgreSQL

Tautology Arts Collective: Founder, Engineering Lead

. Coordinated logistics and engineering for 33 large-scale, ruggedized art installations at Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada and other festivals. Designed lighting and led operational engineering for numerous local art installations. Collaboratively authored conduct guidelines and led the art support camp.

Arduino, Raspberry Pi, C++, Python

Installations
  • Source Energy Labyrinth (Lead engineer), an illuminated labyrinth greets participants in the desert; Exhibited at Burning Man, Black Rock City, NV, in 2022.
  • Synferno (Lead artist and engineer), a system of synchronized flame effects for Tautology's Burning Man sound system; Recipient of Ignition Northwest art grant, exhibited at Critical Northwest, Granite Falls, WA, in 2017.
  • Shadows (Lighting and sound designer, supporting engineer), an interactive light sculpture; Recipient of a regional grant from Kiwiburn, exhibited at KiwiBurn, New Zealand, 2017, Recipient of a grant for Burien Arts A’Glow, Seattle, WA, 2017.
  • Simon 2.0 (Supporting engineer), a large, fire-breathing version of the classic children's memory game; Recipient of an honorarium grant from Black Rock Arts Foundation, exhibited at Burning Man, Black Rock City, NV, in 2015; exhibited at Cascadia in Granite Falls, WA in 2016; exhibited at SeaCompression in Seattle, WA in 2016.
  • Sea Foam (Lighting designer, lead engineer), a lighting installation exhibited at SeaCompression in Seattle, WA in 2016.
  • Rebirth (Lead artist and engineer), a lighting installation installed in the Seattle Conservatory in 2016, exhibited at Burning Man, Black Rock City, NV, 2015.
  • Inflection (Lighting and Power Lead), a large, wooden bridge with a mobius twist; Recipient of an honorarium grant from Black Rock Arts Foundation, exhibited at Burning Man in Black Rock City, NV in 2015; exhibited at Critical Northwest in Mount Vernon, WA in 2015.
  • Silk Road (Lead engineer), a series of arches in the diverse architectural styles of each major city along the ancient Silk Road; Recpiient of an honorarium grant from Black Rock Arts Foundation, exhibited at Burning Man in Black Rock City, NV in 2014; exhibited at Critical Northwest in Mount Vernon, WA in 2014.
Invited Talks
  • Emulating the beauty of nature with light and algorithms at The Conclave Sessions, MOKEDO, Seattle, 2016.

Robly: Staff Engineer

. Developed and maintained a web-based enterprise customer communications application. Performed cryptographic implementation reviews and fixes. Maintained security posture and scalability of the application. Built front-end and infrastructure features to improve product marketability.

Ruby, Rails, Heroku, AWS, Sidekiq, Rspec, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis

March Hare Communications Collective: Lead and Cryptographer

. Built, deployed, and maintained secure software and systems to provide mapping and communication tools for activists to use during political demonstrations.

MySQL, PHP, iOS, Android, Tor, PGP, OTR

Copious: Staff Engineer

. Grew a local digital products agency from 6 people to the INC 5000 fastest privately-owned companies list and the Portland Business Journal's fastest growing companies list three years in a row. Set cryptographic standards for financial data processing for the state of Oregon. Automated testing, deploy, and rollback procedures for all products. Secured, documented and standardized servers, networks and application clusters. Ran monthly penetration tests against a local credit union's systems.

Led development for all software, systems, devops, network, and mobile engineering disciplines. Prototyped algorithms for computer vision, augmented reality, ranking, and categorization systems. Designed, built, and maintained load-balanced, scalable IP network and relational data processing systems. Led research and development efforts to prototype bluetooth integrations and heads-up display software. Developed, deployed, and code reviewed web and mobile front-end builds.

Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, Redis, Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Chef, Neo4j, Redis, JavaScript, Node, Perl, Python, Erlang, iOS, Objective-C, Java, Android, Bluetooth, Cisco

Invited Talks
  • Augmenting Reality with Simulated Synaesthesia. Danne Stayskal and Jillian Ada Burrows at CyborgCamp Portland, 2012.
  • The Internet Under Siege and the Rise of Cyber Insurgency. Kyle Terry and Danne Stayskal at Resistance Ecology Conference 2013.
  • Everone is connected: Measuring Social Geography with Graph Databases. Danne Stayskal at Copious, 2013.
  • Improving Software Predictability with Haskell. Danne Stayskal at Copious, 2013.
  • Decentralized Crisis Communications Coordination. Danne Stayskal and Kyle Terry at Collective Agency, 2012.
  • Cryptogrphic Security in Digital Archivism. Stayskal, Danne. Part of the "Electronic Records Management: Setting up a Stable, Secure Network" panel. Danne Stayskal and Jennifer Mundy at Portland Alliance for Response, Reed College, 2012.
  • Censorship Circumvention with Open Source Tools. Danne Stayskal at Hackmeet, Noisebridge 2011.

Speech Rhythm and Prosody Lab: Graduate Research Assistant
University of Texas at Arlington, Department of Linguistics and TESOL

. Wrote linguistic analysis system to process lexicon, phonology, and morphophonology of 260 spoken languages from Wikipedia inter-language links. Wrote speech recognition routines to syllabify speech stream and extract prosodic suprasegmental features of pitch, duration, and stress. Designed and implementing software to aid in the study of pitch-accent languages through automatic transcription and vowel-duration measurements to develop automated transcription of native american languages. Lab directed by Dr. Jerold Edmondson.

CMU Sphinx, Perl, Python, Ruby, Rails

ECarList: Senior Systems and Software Engineer

. Built a full stack perl-CGI web application that manages auto dealerships. Implemented scalable capacity modeling and failure control systems, fully automated build, test, and deployment operations, overhauled unit and functional test systems, and optimized databases. Integrated Amazon S3 and SMS messaging support. Maintained internal network and development systems. Added mapping support to iPhone application. Developed company coding style and best practice guidelines.

Perl, Apache, MySQL, FreeBSD, Linux, Nagios, JavaScript, Objective-C, Erlang

FreeFlight Systems: Independent Contractor

. Designed cryptographic infrastructure for rotorcraft real-time embedded data storage and retrieval device. This was the first dedicated, commercial flight safety data recorder for military helicopters.

Linux, AES, MILS, DIACAP, Cryptography

Dispositional Risk Influence Lab: Undergraduate Research Assistant
University of Texas at Arlington, Department of Psychology

. Earned Human Subjects Research Compliance certification, Administered weekly study under IRB guidelines to study the relationship between stimulant use and dispositional risk influence. Lab directed by Dr. Dan Levine.

Binary Spring: Senior Software Developer

. Prototyped software in interdisciplinary research lab. Coordinated global network of developers and designers to produce full-stack Ruby on Rails applications. Developed user experience and interface models. Automated configuration management and deployment processes.

Ruby, Rails, Linux, Windows Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server, Capistrano

University of Texas at Arlington: Bachellor of Arts

. Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. Summa cum laude.

Publications
  • The Visceral Society: The Decay and Reconstruction of Human Rights in Modernity. Stayskal, Danne. 2008.
  • Owning Conversation: The intersections of the language, economics, and politics of property. Stayskal, Danne. 2008.

EFW Advanced Systems Research and Development: Senior Software Engineer

. Adapted and maintained web-based, data-driven failure analysis and corrective action system. Performed information assurance and security certification for RF and network systems. Built and deployed counter-IED cellphone jammer system. Designed and prototyped software, firmware, and hardware for embedded cryptographic and language processing devices. Wrote and adapted Linux kernel cryptographic modules. Designed user experience and mathematical models for ground and aircraft navigation systems.

Led international engineering effort to design, develop, and deploy a nation's grid network testing infrastructure. Trained software interns in agile methodologies and secure development practices. Performed statistical analysis and mathematical airflow modeling for rotorcraft systems. Debugged network protocol stack implementations. Authored, designed, reviewed, and edited specifications, manuals, software documentation, and marketing materials.

Linux, C++, Mathematica, Maple, Wireshark, Nmap, DARPA, DITSCAP

Everything2: Root, Operations, Administrator

. Built and led one of the Internet's oldest and largest writing communities. Developed content and legal strategies for the site's administrative team. Tuned intellectual property guidelines. Developed and maintained site's open source codebase. Served as content editor as needed for articles on computing, networking, and language. Node ID 650043.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, mod_perl

KNSR: Senior Systems Engineer, Infrastructure

: Designed, deployed, and maintained fault-tolerant DNS, web, authentication, mail, database, and provisioning systems for an internet service provider. Developed and deployed wide and metropolitan-area wireless network and support systems. Maintained VOIP infrastructure on Cisco and Mikrotik hardware.

FreeBSD, Qmail, Apache, DJBDNS, FreeRADIUS, 802.11, Active Directory, MikroTik

Rational Decision Making Lab: Undergraduate Research Assistant
University of Texas at Arlington, Department of Psychology

. Developed card game software to evaluate a subject's performance on the Iowa Gambling Task through weekly iterations. Lab directed by Dr. Timothy Odegard.

Superhero Networks: Senior Software Engineer & Senior Systems Administrator

. Built an Internet Service Provider to serve rural Texas. Built software systems for service provisioning, support tickets, billing, deployments, and customer relationship management. Maintained fault-tolerant mail, DNS, authentication, directory services, database, and support systems. Provided highest-tier tech support to customers as needed. Re-cabled two dozen racks of hardware according to IEEE 802.3 specifications. Authored documentation and test procedures.

FreeBSD, Perl, mod_perl, Apache, Linux, DJBDNS, Windows 2000, Qmail, Radiator

La Casa de la Esperanza: Missionary

. Collected donations of computer and network hardware for an orphanage in Mexico. Designed and built educational network over three summer trips. Led transportation and deployment effort in main facility in Anahuac, Chihuahua, Mexico. Documented network architecture and provided training to the home's staff.

Linux, OpenOffice, Samba

Viisage: Independent Contractor

. Developed and tested eigenspatial biometric facial recognition access control system for a security company.

Windows 2000, Visual Studio, Visual C++

American Health Underwriters: Software Developer, Network Administrator

. Built and improved office systems for an insurance company. Developed telecommunications interface and control systems. Managed medium-scale network platform migration from Novell to GNU/Linux. Managed T1 voice and data circuits. Designed, deployed and administered email, web, backup, data warehousing, billing, and quality assurance systems. Maintained hybrid TCP/IP and IPX/SPX network.

Novell NetWare, Windows XP, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Linux, Qmail, Cyrus IMAP

Expert Computer Systems: Systems and Network Technician

. Built computer repair tools. Diagnosed and repaired desktops, servers, laptops, displays, and printers for a local computer repair shop. Became the youngest person ever to earn all available certifications in IBM hardware repair. Became certified in Microsoft and Novell operating systems, and Samsung phone system configuration. Built company reputation as regional subject matter expert for Apple hardware and software. Designed and built 400-node hybrid TCP/IP and IPX/SPX metropolitan-area fiber and copper network for local school district.

Novell NetWare, Windows, DOS

Truswall: Independent Contractor

. Entered technical workforce at age 14. Built 36 computers from 50 broken ones for the rural Texas roofing company that owned the dumpster where she found the parts for her first computer.

"Y'all shouldn't throw these away, ma'am, they're not broken!"