Amir Malik

📌 Qualifications

• Over 15 years of software project management experience.
• Formerly head of engineering for largest paid VPN provider in the world ($4MM monthly revenue, 1+ million active users).
• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, from OS-level networking and infrastructure up through application logic, cloud architecture, and UX.
• Rapid prototyping using agentic coding tools, Claude Code, Codex, MCP servers, and custom agent workflows.
• Deep experience in networking, proxies, VPN protocols, and distributed systems.
• Currently focused on AI systems and agent infrastructure, including sandboxed execution environments, agent workflows, and RAG-style architectures.

💻 Work Experience

• March 2010 – Present

  Pilvy LLC

  USA
  Founder

  Managing a software consulting agency, leading product development, engineering, and managing third-party contractors. Currently specializing in AI systems and agent infrastructure, networking systems, and security. Past in-house and customer projects include:

  • Plug - Static IP solution for remote teams. Route specific websites, apps, APIs, and database traffic through a dedicated exit IP.
  • ExecAPI - Zero-infrastructure background jobs as a service. Schedule Cron jobs, on-demand webhooks, and more. Run any Docker container as part of a workflow.
  • KVdb - A NoSQL key-value database as a service and serverless developer platform for prototyping, metrics collection, web crawling, analytics applications, and more.
  • Uno - A new take on password management with automatic one-click sign-in for any website. Built the original PoC and later contributed key components, including the client-side web automation engine and browser extension UI. Acquired by Okta in 2023.
  • Business VPN - A cybersecurity solution and VPN service for SMBs based on our VPN Client/Server Toolkit product. Acquired by London Trust Media (makers of Private Internet Access VPN service) in 2018.
  • Pilvy VPN Server - A modern VPN server solution with extensive customizability and plugin support. Offered as an on-premise license or a hosted service.
  • PIA VPN for iOS - Client app for Private Internet Access VPN service. Uses generated iOS configuration profiles to deliver an easy-to-use VPN experience, instead of having users manually configure PPTP or L2TP/IPsec settings.
  • IVPN Client for Mac & Windows - Developed a custom OpenVPN client for IVPN that includes critical privacy and security features like insecure WiFi detection, DNS leak prevention, and firewall blocking.
  • VMware End User Computing Demo Portal - A turnkey Desktop as a Service (DaaS) that lets VMware's sales teams easily demonstrate the Horizon product suite to high-value customers.
  • CloudPlay - A Mac app that lets people quickly find and play music from a variety of sources.
• May 2023 – August 2024

  Laguna Games, Inc.

  San Francisco, CA
  Principal Security Architect

  Built backend infrastructure and DevOps pipelines for Laguna Games, makers of Crypto Unicorns, a web3 farming game with its own token economy and NFTs.

  • Implemented AWS Well-Architected Framework security best practices, including use of CloudTrail, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Systems Manager Session Manager (SSM), VPC flow logs, etc. to ensure audited and controlled access to production services with minimal to no use of IAM access keys or SSH keys.
  • Built and managed DevOps workflows using GitHub Actions, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform across a variety of AWS services, regions, and accounts, using the latest security best practices like OpenID Connect (OIDC).
  • Deployed and managed Kubernetes (EKS) clusters for blockchain nodes and optimized EBS volumes for random high-throughput I/O workloads.
  • Instrumented critical node.js services used for web3 blockchain transaction signing with OpenTelemetry distributed spans, metrics, logs, and traces.
  • Developed in-house Slack bot for DevOps visibility into various AWS systems.
• August 2020 – March 2021

  Letter Technology, Inc. (YC S20)

  San Diego, CA
  Principal Software Engineer

  Letter—a private bank and wealth management platform.

  Design and development of core functionality in Letter's Event Sourcing microservices architecture prior to public launch, including:

  • Led development of internal admin tool that integrates Twilio Flex to provide a simple interface for customer support agents to access relevant information about customer accounts. Implemented security controls to require agents to request access to view customers' data by integrating push notifications in the mobile app.
  • Implemented secure storage of secrets and third-party tokens as a microservice backed by HashiCorp Vault.
  • Implemented notifications microservice, which consumes events from across the system, and sends out emails, SMS, and push notifications, depending on each user's notification settings. Corresponding functionality also implemented in the React Native-based mobile app.
  • Researched and prototyped debit card activation strategies in the mobile app, like embedding custom NDEF data in NFC tag at time of card manufacture/personalization.
  • Implemented workflow engine to allow use of business process modeling tools to more easily develop future products and services.
• July 2018 – September 2019

  London Trust Media, Inc.

  Denver, CO
  Head of Private Business Network

  Product owner and technical team lead for a next-gen cybersecurity web filtering and endpoint protection product. Developed custom VPN client/server framework, IP packet filtering plugin architecture, DNS packet inspection and rewriting technology, and Single Sign-On (SSO). Designed end-to-end least-privilege event auditing framework with customer-controlled encryption keys.

• April 2015 – February 2016

  London Trust Media, Inc.

  Los Angeles, CA
  Chief Technology Officer

  As CTO, created and managed technology strategy for Private Internet Access, the leading paid VPN service provider in the world, as well as other initiatives in the company.

  • Managed remote developer team across 3 times zones with minimal process.
  • Reduced customer support costs and workload by improving diagnostics reporting and building internal tools.
  • Handled technical recruitment, sourcing, interviewing candidates, negotiating offers, and onboarding.
  • Triaged and evaluated security vulnerabilities from researchers as part of PIA's Whitehat Alert Security Program.
  • Managed technical relationships with vendors, service providers, and B2B partners.
  • Prototyped new product ideas to help executives plan future roadmap.
  • Performed technical due diligence on potential startup investments and other M&A activity.

🥇 Awards & Acknowledgements

• 7 January, 2014

  Apparatus, system, and method for SOAP access to data source procedures

  U.S. Patent - US 8,627,345

  An invention that dynamically exposes user-defined database functions (stored procedures) through a web service (e.g., REST API) without requiring the schema of the underlying data to be defined beforehand. Although the initial implementation used the XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as was popular in the late 2000s, the invention is applicable to any network transport protocol.

🎓 Education

University of California, Santa Cruz

Presented senior design project paper “Universal Real-Time Navigational Assistance (URNA): An Urban Bluetooth Beacon for the Blind” at HealthNet 2007 workshop at ACM MobiSys 2007.