Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick

Chief Engineer at Tailscale

Brad Fitzpatrick is a pioneering software engineer, entrepreneur, and open-source advocate best known for creating LiveJournal, one of the earliest major social networking platforms, memcached, a widely adopted caching system now integral to countless high-traffic websites, and OpenID. After LiveJournal, Brad went on to work at Google, where he focused on distributed social networking, implemented performance optimizations on the Android Framework team, and later joined the early Go team where h e worked on the Go standard library, Go build system, and internal Google Go libraries. After 12 years at Google, Brad developed an itch to do a start-up again to be able to go all-in on actually using Go, instead of just working on Go. He joined Tailscale in 2020 to make networking fun and simple, and has been learning networking ever since. At Tailscale, he’s worked on just about everything from the data plane to clients to rigged Bingo games but is primarily responsible for the backend. Throughout his career, he has been an active voice in the open-source community, shaping numerous projects with a strong emphasis on scalability and distributed systems. While once a fan of traveling and speaking all over the world and sleeping whenever he wanted, Brad is now instead housebound in Seattle where he attends to his three many children and occasionally finds time to work on his overbuilt homelab.