developer.sh
Aaron Quirk.
$ writing code & shipping things
Lifelong developer building the infrastructure that keeps the internet's address book running. Currently CTO at Unstoppable Domains. Active inventor with 150+ patents filed.
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01 / about
whoami
$ cat about.txt
Lifelong developer who's been writing code since before most people had internet. Two-plus decades shipping software at scale — from JVM internals at IBM, to Kubernetes-as-a-Service in the cloud, to the modern domain registry stack.
$ history | grep dns
Funny thing — my very first job out of school was on a DNS services team. Twenty years and a long detour through app servers, performance engineering, and cloud, I'm back to working on domains. The internet's address book has a way of pulling you back.
$ echo $ROLE
CTO at Unstoppable Domains. Leading engineering as we build a next-generation ICANN domain registrar, leveraging AI to optimize development and ship innovative products.
$ cat inventor.txt
150+ patents filed across domains, cloud, performance, and AI. View on Google Patents →
$ _
02 / experience
career.log
Unstoppable Domains
4+ yrs
May 2026 → Present
Chief Technology Officer
Leading a team of engineers building a next-generation ICANN domain registrar. Leveraging AI to optimize the development lifecycle and ship new, innovative products to our users.
May 2023 → May 2026 · 3 yrs
Principal Engineer
Architected core registry platform components for a next-generation ICANN domain registrar. Used blockchain technology to optimize and secure the domain name lifecycle.
May 2022 → May 2023 · 1 yr
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Built a decentralized platform for SSO and identity management in the emerging digital identity ecosystem.
IBM
16 yrs
Oct 2014 → May 2022 · 7 yrs 8 mos
Senior Software Engineer — IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Squad lead for a team of 10 developers. Original member of the IBM Containers team — played key roles moving the platform from incubation to a generally available Kubernetes service.
Sep 2012 → Oct 2014 · 2 yrs 2 mos
Advisory Performance Engineer — PureApplication System
Team lead for software performance. Reduced latency for workload provisioning and elastic scaling, increased VM density, optimized API response time across the cloud management tier.
May 2011 → Sep 2012 · 1 yr 5 mos
Staff Performance Engineer — PureApplication System
Owned identification and resolution of software performance issues in the cloud control plane — workload provisioning time, VM density, security optimization, and API throughput.
Feb 2008 → May 2011 · 3 yrs 4 mos
Software Engineer — WebSphere Application Server
WAS developer focused on performance optimization. Key contributions around reducing lock contention to enable a single JVM instance to scale further.
Feb 2006 → Feb 2008 · 2 yrs 1 mo
Software Engineer — IBM Global Services
Member of the DNS/DHCP delivery team. Designed, developed, and maintained mission-critical applications in the DNS/DHCP space, plus tooling to optimize team operations.
03 / patents
highlights
// cloud & kubernetes
Predicts which container image layers to pre-provision at a node by analyzing layer metadata and future workload requirements — reducing container startup latency at scale.
// performance engineering
Dynamically monitors real-time application metrics inside a VM and tunes VM parameters on the fly to achieve optimal application performance.
// identity & access
A system for granting users access to applications by verifying token-based credentials across heterogeneous systems — the kind of cross-domain identity plumbing that underpins modern registrar infrastructure.
04 / stack
what I work with
languages
BashC#GoJavaJavaScriptPythonReactTypeScript
domain & dns
BINDDHCPDNSSECEPPIXFRRDAPTSIGWHOIS
cloud & infra
CI/CDDockerKubernetesLinuxRedisSQLTerraform
performance
API ThroughputHigh AvailabilityJVMLatency OptimizationLock Free OptimizationVM Density
leadership
AIEngineering ManagerMentorshipSquad LeadSystem Architecture
05 / education
academic.log
NC State University
M.S., Computer Networking Software
Graduate research focused on networking software and systems performance.
NC State University
B.S., Computer Science
Park Scholar Class of 2003.
06 / contact
let's connect
Got a domain question or engineering challenge?
Whether it's internet infrastructure, AI tooling, or just nerding out about DNS — happy to chat.