Work Experience
Protocol Engineer
Company: Aleo
Dates: Q1. 2023 - Current
Description: Aleo provides a platform for building private applications using zero knowledge proofs.
Responsibilities:
- Protocol engineering for Varuna proof system and Bullshark consensus protocol
- Creating of Rust, js/wasm & python SDKs to provide accessibility to the Aleo protocol
Senior Software Engineer
Company: MobileCoin
Dates: Q4. 2021 - Q4 2022
Description: MobileCoin is a private cryptocurrency that the encrypts all data on senders, receivers, and amounts within transactions. It uses elliptic curve cryptography within Intel SGX enclaves to encrypt transactions and then validates them in encrypted form using zero knowledge proofs
Responsibilities:
- Data integrity validation for block data
- Chain of trust validation for block producers/consumers
- Implementing block data streaming with async Rust and gRPC to decrease transaction time
- Implementing new transaction types
- Building foreign function interfaces (ffis) between Rust and Swift/Java to enable mobile app support for new transaction types
- Performing regular code reviews, design meetings, and engineering retrospectives on MobileCoin protocol evolution
Machine Learning Developer
Company: Hashsignals
Dates: Q1. 2016 - Q3 2021
Description:
Consultancy focused on applying modern statistical analysis and machine learning methods to build and retain audiences within entertainment and consumer app software
Responsibilities:
- Making in-game recommendation engines using matrix factorization based methods
- Using Apache Spark to perform ETL on unstructured data for consumption by ML models
- Building corpora and transformer NLP models for NER / bot dialog / intent analysis
- Putting ML model prediction code into client-side mobile apps to ease server load
- Designing user interfaces to ML technology and testing them with end users
Secondary projects included developing strategies for cryptocurrency trading
Machine Learning Developer
Company: Loggly
Dates: Q1. 2014 - Q4. 2015
Description:
Loggly is a cloud log aggregation company. Loggly desired to apply machine learning to automate routing client communications to appropriate support personnell/resources to increase sales and customer retention
Responsibilities:
- Performing longitudinal analysis and unsupervised learning methods on sales data to understand the factors behind successful sales conversions
- Analyzing client-volunteered datasets in order to generate profiles of usages patterns for different industry verticals
- Creating inbound classification systems that classified inquiries into several buckets which indicated what approach and how much effort should be taken in converting the client
- Creating classification systems which recommended support resources to Loggly clients and recommended courses of action to support personnell
- Developing libraries for attaching loggly quickly to various programming languages, 3rd party software and libraries
Managing Partner
Company: Bitfold Online Games
Dates: Q2. 2008 - Q4. 2013
Description:
Co-Founder of Bitfold, a game developer focused on mobile social games. Bitfold worked on both original game titles and the games of major clients such as Wargaming.net, Playdom (acquired by Disney), and Atari
Responsibilities:
- Produced and guided technical direction for 6 games using varying tech stacks. Implemented a unified analytics backend for all game engines used to produce client games
- Oversaw a mix of onshore/offshore teams for each project ranging between 4-15 people per project
- Negotiated new game development details, managed client expectations, oversaw ongoing operation of games
Game Developer
Company: Realmware Coporation
Dates: Q2. 2006 - Q2. 2008
Description:
Realmware Corporation was the maker of a C# based game engine called Visual3D that was used to make games and training simulations for private industry
Application developer assigned to the following projects over the course of employment
- Development of sample games for clients to get started with
- Development of custom simulations for clients
- Development of the Visual3D rendering engine
- Development of new physics engine features
- Development of documentation
- Support of major version releases of the Visual3D Game Engine
- Management of offshore developers
Skills
Competencies
Cryptographic Software: Working knowledge of fundamental mathematics behind cryptography (group/field/information/number theory, etc.) Experience combining key exchanges, group theory fundamentals, signatures/proofs, hash functions and information hiding into cryptosystems
Blockchain Development: Direct experience in engineering distributed blockchains. Solid familiarity with consensus protocols like SCP, blockchain transaction proof math, chains of trust within blockchains, and communication between multiple node types within a network. Experienced in utilizing public and private blockchains within an application stack
Async and Parallel Computing: Competent in using both parallelization and concurrency in software. Solid knowledge of how to instrument asynchronous futures/tasks/executors in multiple languages
Data Wrangling: Finessing messy data into formats where meaningful analysis can be performed. Building data pipelines on both small scales using tools like Pandas/Numpy/Scikit Learn and larger scales using combinations of tools like Apache Spark and Amazon Kinesis. Continous data migration from production databases
Model Development and Deployment: Knowledge of how to create and validate machine learning models from principled mathematical approaches. Experience deploying ML pipelines and developing human interfaces with machine learning products
Cloud Based Web Apps: Experience running apps in AWS and holder of AWS certifications. Secondary experience building apps in Google Firebase, Cloudflare Workers and several niche cloud providers like fly.io
Team Management and Priority Setting: Building compassionate teams that do constant priority evaluation, supportive code review and Socratic post mortems of engineering decisions
Tool Stack
Languages (Mastery): Rust, Python
Languages (Proficient): C++, C#, Julia, Javascript, Java, Lua, Dart/Flutter
Concurrency/Parallelism: Tokio/Futures/Rayon (Rust), Asyncio/Aiohttp/Asyncpg/Subprocess/Ray (Python)
ML/AI Frameworks: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Spark, Huggingface Transformers, Julia
Cryptograph Frameworks: Arkworks, Dalek Cryptograph Stack, Leo/Aleo Cryptography stack
Testing/Deployment: Mocha, CircleCI, PyTest, UnitTest, Enzyme, Jest, Github Actions
Visualization: Matplotlib, GGplot2, Plotly/Dash
Databases/Caches: PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, Redis, GraphQL, Lmdb, gRPC/Protobuf
Cloud Infrastructure: Amazon Stack (EC2/Lambda/RDS/SQS/ECS/IAM/S3/etc.), Google Stack (Compute/Firebase/Cloud Functions), Cloudflare, Fly.io
Blockchain: Rust, Eliptic Curve Cryptography, Bulletproofs/Range Proofs/Merkle Proofs, Ethereum Ecosystem (Solidity/MetaMask/Truffle/Etc.), Stellar & Bullshark Consensus Protocols
Mathematical Skills
Cryptographic Mathematics: Fluency with ZkSnarks, elliptic curve cryptography and foundational subjects such as group theory, number theory, and information theory. Able to maintain & extend proof systems.
ML Modeling Mathematics: Linear Algebra & Tensor Calculus whiz. Fluency with applied mathematical constructs used in most common ML models.
Statistics: Able to apply statistical methods to temporal data to understand correlations that change across time
Soft Skills
Startup Operations: Founder level experience in building tech companies
Recruiting and Team Building: Hired/managed dozens of resources from development to sales
Team Management: Many years of experience guiding software development teams towards difficult goals
Education
BS - Aerospace Engineering
2006 - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact Me
312.715.7419
superuser@hashsignals.com
