Howdy, I'm Evan 👋

I'm a Senior Engineer at Okta living in the Urbana-Champaign, Illinois area. I'm passionate about building great, secure software and helping other developers do the same.

• I've been with Okta since 2020, working on Auth0's (Okta's Customer Identity Cloud) open-source SDK libraries. I am the maintainer of the company's PHP, Laravel, Symfony, and WordPress SDKs, although I contribute heavily across all our language and framework offerings.
• I was also our team's lead security engineer. I proactively monitored and researched security issues, led multi-quarter strike teams on security initiatives, was on call for rapid response to supply chain concerns, and established our team's security-first engineering culture.
• In January 2024, I joined Okta's Fine Grain Authorization (FGA) team, where we're developing a high-performance relationship-based access control (ReBAC) solution inspired by Google's Zanzibar. I'm deeply involved in both OpenFGA (our open-source server and libraries, and a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project) as well as Okta's robust services platform built atop it.
• Previously, I was a Senior Engineer on the immensely consequential open-source Ushahidi platform, a popular tool for (among many other uses) crowdsourcing data in emergencies, protecting civil liberties, defending democratic voting processes, and empowering citizen journalism. I'm still incredibly proud of the work done there and that it continues to live on and provide human-centered tools that help people solve challenging, real-world situations. My work at Ushahidi solidified the importance of security engineering in my mind: protecting the personal data you're entrusted with is an incredible responsibility that can indeed mean the difference between life and death for people in some dangerous situations. These learnings are what have shaped my career toward security and privacy and what remains an absolute priority in all my work.
• In what now feels like a previous life, I was a Technical Video Game Designer and worked on a number of commercial titles for Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. I still adore building video games, but now I dabble in them just for fun.

Contact Me

You can reach me via email at hello@evansims.com. If you'd like to connect, I can be found on BlueSky or LinkedIn.