About Jan Brennenstuhl

Hi, I’m Jan. I live and work in Berlin, where I was born and raised.

I work as a principal engineer for application security, and most of my time goes into making agentic engineering secure and efficient. Before that I spent years building and operating identity systems used by millions of customers, balancing usability and security in high-stakes revenue funnels. That is where my interest in the overlap of security, usability and automation comes from.

The list of things I’ve worked on is long and mostly unglamorous: e-commerce funnels, rule engines, cloud strategies, identity and access management (IAM) and single sign-on (SSO), REST APIs, system integrations, legacy migrations, decommissioning projects and splitting up monoliths. I’ve practised software archaeology more often than I’ve started a greenfield service.

I prefer internet standards, open source software and open formats over custom builds. In my experience, the best software comes from small teams of product-minded engineers with a narrow scope and a clear picture of what they are building. I enjoy leading and coaching engineers as much as building and running software that is reliable, secure and maintainable.

Right now the biggest piece of that is the open-source Agentic Identity Broker, which Magnus Jungsbluth and I build so that an agent can act for a person without holding that person’s credentials. The now page says what I’m working on this month, and the speaking page lists the talks.

I hold an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Potsdam, with a thesis on certificate management in the cloud for authentication in a university environment, and I studied Media Informatics at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

Away from the keyboard: cycling, coffee and hiking.