Charlotte Brandhorst-Satzkorn

charlotte@catzkorn.dev • github.com/catzkorn • catzkorn.dev • Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Canada

Personal Profile

Meticulous, user-focused software engineer with a strong track record of delivering high-quality features that address real user needs. Leverage a non-technical background to bring a unique, empathetic lens to product development. Proactively identify cross-functional issues and lead initiatives that improve both customer experience and internal workflows.

Experience

Edera (November 2024 - July 2025)#

Senior Software Engineer#

Go, Rust, Typescript, React, Prometheus, among others

Joined as an early engineer focusing on product user experience, from the CLI to observability and documentation, while improving backend processes and tooling.

  • Designed and delivered the Edera Demo Portal, a website which dynamically deploys the Edera Protect product in the cloud, allowing users to test the product via a browser-embedded SSH session, securely proxied via a websocket. This was created for Kubecon EU as an engineering driven effort to gain business leads.

  • Redesigned and reimplemented the Edera Orchestrator from Rust to Go, increasing documentation, testing and functionality standards of the service.

  • Developed a framework for future observability standards and implemented the first phase in the Edera Orchestrator, following industry best practices.

  • Rewrote the existing Rust-specific Protobuf generation script into a generation-language agnostic, flexible and extensible framework, including linting, formatting and generation. Implemented industry best practice CI jobs to ensure consistent generation from Protobuf files.

  • Refactored legacy code for the Edera Kubernetes SPDY proxy to improve readability, adding tests and remediating issues found. Added support for the Kubernetes v5 Port-Forward protocol, utilizing SPDY and gRPC bidirectional streaming.

  • Added auto-completion and made various user experience improvements to the Edera Protect CLI.

  • Relaunched the Edera documentation site, added CLI and Metrics docs, as well as lead generating call to actions.

  • Created developer docs for setting up the Edera development environment, both locally and cloud-based, reducing friction for engineers.

  • Spearheaded multiple internal initiatives surrounding customer experience, developer experience, development process and other areas.

Sabbatical (July 2024 - November 2024)#

Short sabbatical to pursue personal health and endurance sport goals, including a multi-day trail running stage race.

Tailscale (March 2021 - July 2024)#

Senior Software Engineer#

Go, Typescript, React, SQLite, Postgres, REST, OpenTelemetry, among others

Joined as an early engineer, working across the product from the Tailscale client through to the control servers backend and frontend development.

  • Designed and delivered the Custom OIDC feature, a generic OIDC authentication integration from prototype to General Availability, ahead of time, allowing the onboarding of large new customers.

  • Delivered flagship features such as Tailscale’s Mullvad VPN integration, HTTPS certificate automation, MagicDNS General Availability, and App Connectors, significantly increasing the ARR of the business.

  • Performed multiple major database schema migrations across disparate database technologies, minimizing downtime and ensuring data consistency through extensive preparation and testing.

  • Introduced and led the integration of OpenTelemetry and HoneyComb to improve observability of internal services, significantly expediting the identification and diagnosis of service and user issues.

  • Championed engineering and business policy initiatives from proposal to completion, most notably the user focused SSO tax removal from the pricing model.

  • Took ownership of the Tailscale Reddit community, developing it into a flourishing community, building customer relationships with new market segments.

  • Mentored multiple university interns leading to offers of employment.

  • Worked closely with the support team to engage directly with customers to gain feedback, better the product, and improve user outcomes.

  • Contributed blog posts and documentation to the tailscale.com website and knowledge base.

  • Integrated third-party integrations, such as Stripe, Postmark, Mullvad, among others.

  • Worked across teams to improve internal tooling such as testing, logs- and support infrastructure.

Open Source Contributions#

net/http - Content-Length parsing for js/wasm#

  • Corrected parsing of Content-Length header in the net/http library for the js/wasm HTTP client.

pkg.go.dev - Link to latest module version#

  • Contributed code allowing users to see a link to the latest version of a module.

Education

Makers Academy Bootcamp (2020)#

  • Built applications in variety of languages, including Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (PostgreSQL, ActiveRecord) and Go.
  • Deployed to, and interacted with, cloud platforms including AWS, GCP and Heroku.

University of Southampton (2014 - 2019)#

PhD Candidate, NERC CDT in Oil and Gas#

Base and Heavy Metal Mobilisation during Hydraulic Fracturing of Black Shales

  • Exploring fluid-rock interactions and metal mobilisation to inform regulation and best practices for shale exploration onshore in the United Kingdom.
  • Solely responsible for project management and direction, designing and executing experimental procedures simulating hydraulic fracturing conditions in a laboratory setting.
  • Withdrew from the program prematurely in 2019 due to illness.

University of Portsmouth (2011-2014)#

Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Environmental Science#

Acid Mine Drainage and Toxic Metal Contamination from Abandoned Mine Tailings in Adak, Northern Sweden

Interests

Trail running, mountaineering, skiing, and motorsport enthusiast. Currently training for a trail ultra marathon. Passionate about environmental science and global sustainability.