Howdy! Evan here. 👋

I’m a software engineering leader, developer advocate, and co-founder. I love hard problems and the real people who use what we build. Most of my career I’ve worked at the intersection of identity, authorization, security, and developer experience.

Today I’m co-founder and CTO at InferaDB, the authorization database: Zanzibar-inspired, AuthZEN-compliant, and purpose-built for fine-grained access control at scale. The goal is to make authorization explainable and composable, so developers can model real-world relationships and ship auditable access control across services, APIs, and AI agents.

Previously, I was a founding engineer on the OpenFGA team at Okta, where we shipped one of the first Zanzibar-inspired ReBAC solutions to market: OpenFGA and the Auth0 FGA SaaS built on it. OpenFGA is now a CNCF incubating project used by Grafana Labs, Docker, and Canonical. Before that, I was an early engineer on Auth0’s developer experience team and shipped 45+ open source libraries. Earlier still, I helped build crisis-response tools at Ushahidi, with deployments at the United Nations and during the Fukushima disaster response. That work taught me to take security, privacy, and the people on the other end of the software seriously.

When I’m not working, I’m usually reading history and philosophy, exploring longevity and biohacking, or getting lost in music.

This is where I share what I’ve learned about building authorization systems, developer platforms, and engineering teams that actually enjoy the work.

Some of my recent favorite writings include:

Read more of my writing here.

I also occasionally do talks, produce videos, host podcasts, and advise companies. Reach out if interested in collaborating.