Principal Engineer, Applied Cryptographer, R&D

I'm looking for a new role. If you're looking for an experienced software engineer and applied cryptographer, please reach out on X, TG, or email.

I thrive on novelty, difficulty, and the esoteric. I'm great at marshaling uncertainty and making complexity coherent. I've had my best successes acting as an interface between C-levels and un-specced technical problems, distilling a problem domain into an accessible narrative, and converting asks into action.

Since 2022, I've been deep into rolling out production-grade ZK circuits with Circom, deploying TLS Notary for proving from traditional reputation stores, building Rust-based WASM engines for the browser, and all of the other things that go into productionizing a bleeding-edge crypto identity solution.

Before my current role, I was a Principal Engineer for a major US internet telecom. After that, I did grants coordination for the PSE team at the Ethereum Foundation, followed by a stint with eth.limo, working on the problems in bridging the traditional internet via an ENS gateway.

I am generally very R&D-heavy. There's never been an idea that I've balked at implementing. Coming from my 13 years in telecom and applied cryptography, I have a very broad base in software engineering, infrastructure, networking, security, compliance, crypto, and more.

I taught myself cryptography from ~zero over a couple of months of reading, talking to people in the ZK ecosystem, and seeking to understand Tornado.cash, while helping others to onboard into ZK along the way.

In my current role, I brought a team of traditional software devs up to speed on how to integrate with and deploy cryptographic solutions. The team went from "what are elliptic curves", to consuming ZK circuits, integrating MPC-TLS, and blind signatures in production.

If you have a role for me, or if you know of someone who does, please reach out.

Doing applied zero knowledge application development, currently focused on client-side-friendly ZK proofs for on-chain KYC/AML. My research focus is in how one builds user-facing zero knowledge protocols which use simple cryptographic primitives, have minimal verification costs, clear trust assumptions, and which are relatively simple to audit. I am particularly focused on creating ZK protocols which interoperate with real world concerns such as legal reputation, regulatory compliance, and real world identity.

• Web Proofs (zk-tls, mpc-tls)
• Security engineering (Cryptography, threat mitigation, compliance)
• Telecom systems engineering (SMS, VOIP, SMPP, SIP)
• Network engineering (Cloud provisioning, K8S clustering)
• Operational intelligence, data science

• Zero Knowledge cryptography
• Sybil resistance
• Cryptoeconomics
• Privacy
• Adversarial Interoperability
• Due Process by Design

2019 Blockchain network communication management, US20210243036A1

2022 - Present Keyring Network

• Developed the ZK privacy protocol for on-chain KYC/AML from the ground up
• Developed a number of ZK cryptographic primitives in Circom, Typescript, and Rust
• Developed a ZK circuit development toolchain in Typescript
• Implemented ZK-constructed Blinded RSA signing
• Developed an OrbitDB-based decentralized protocol messaging layer
• Productionized TLS Notary for MPC-TLS-based Web Proofs
• Support and guidance around privacy, security, decentralization, trust minimization

2022 - 2023 eth.limo

• Provided guidance and support for reducing trust assumptions, increasing privacy, decentralizing, and improving performance
• Developed Chauffeur, a local infrastructure stack for ENS resolution and serving

2021 - August 2022 Ethereum Foundation - PSE Team

• Developed a ZK system for proving knowledge of JWTs issued by social identity providers
• Produced open source ZK cryptographic primitives
• Provided community education and support for ZK tooling, mixers, and other privacy/crypto projects
• Talent scouting, routing prospects toward ESP projects
• Grants coordination, bootstrapping
• Bootstrapped product management processes for bringing grant projects toward production
• Infrastructure support for compiling large ZK circuits

2013 - 2021 CallFire / EzTexting

• Started as a vendor for SMS connectivity through SMSCloud
• Professional Services work for enterprise customers, developing custom call scheduling, routing, and reporting solutions
• Developed CallFire's PHP SDK
• Refactored majority of message processing, routing, and origination software for EzTexting
• Acted as Platform Architect, DevOps Engineer, Security Engineer
• Produced a "Cloud Caller" provisioning automation system which enabled 20X increase in outbound capacity
• Oversaw migration to automated cloud provisioning tooling, automated monitoring system
• Developed Operational Intelligence platform producing reporting, monitoring, and analysis for infrastructure and telephony operations
• Acted as Principal Engineer in Operations, overseeing infrastructure management, security, carrier operations
• Developed an automated, heuristic-and-machine-learning-based messaging compliance system, enforcing industry content regulations
• Developed anti-spam, anti-fraud threat modelling engine
• Acted as Principal Engineer in Growth, bootstrapping a Growth team effectively utilizing A/B testing to massively decrease churn, increase conversion and ARPU

2013 - 2019 Roave

• Developed and managed SMSCloud, a high-throughput SMSC connecting businesses to telephony carrier networks
• Oversaw operations of software development agency business (contract negotiations, recruitment, etc)

2012 MediaDevils

• Ecommerce sweatshop
• Built numerous custom ecommerce websites for "As Seen on TV" products
• Built custom membership video streaming platforms
• Built specialized social network / online learning platforms

2008 - 2016 PHP

• Credited documentation maintainer
• Voting project member
• Community management (IRC, reddit, etc)
• Founded PHP Mentoring
• Contributed to Zend Framework