There's no personal risk to writing regime circumvention tools. Iran isn't going to have you assassinated for your work on Tor.
There is serious risk to using Tor in Iran. Death squads and disappearances aren't a conspiracy theory in Iran; they are the regime's well-understood M.O. When circumvention tools like Tor work, they hide your traffic from the regime. When they stop working, or are turned, they do exactly the opposite: they attach a statistical marker to your traffic that says "whether or not you can read these packets, the person sending them is interesting".
The people working on circumvention tools are mostly well-intentioned (many of them are friends of mine), but they are delusional about the SWOT analysis at play here. None of them have any unique skills that aren't available to an organization willing to shell out 6-7 figures to a team in a month. Money buys competence. A lot of money buys a lot of competence. Iran has a lot of money. Circumvention projects do not.
Kickstarter hasn't seen the amount of money that a world government could spend without director-level approval on a project to turn a circumvention tool against its users.
And that's before you get to the fact that many, if not most, of the computers in authoritarian regimes are probably already rootkitted.