Nathan Taylor

Performance lead for Semgrep's static analysis engine, improving median and tail scan times by 3× and reducing the MCP server's latency by over 4×. Led the migration to Multicore OCaml, enabling fine-grain parallelism improvements. In the Office of the CTO, led fine-tuning efforts for next-gen neurosymbolic program analysis products.

Researched systems applications of lightweight formal methods. Verified crash consistency of a persistent memory filesystem. Mechanised validating an optimised Paxos implementation against its formal spec.

Took a break from corporate life to teach, read research papers, and help out on interesting problems:

• At Microsoft Research, contributed to a research storage engine that combined low-latency ML and dynamic analysis to optimise index structure layout. Reduced critical-path latency by 40%. Mentored PhD interns.
• At RLCore Technologies, built reliable and safe systems for reinforcement learning-driven industrial control systems. Implemented property-based testing and record/replay debugging frameworks for RL agents.
• At The University of Toronto and MacEwan University, developed and taught undergrad CS courses.

Developed high-performance GPU simulators modeling in-development SoCs, reproducing functional behaviour at interactive framerates, allowing developers to start programming before tapeout.

Developed Fauna's strongly consistent, distributed database. Built a greybox fault injection tester to verify safety properties and maintain development velocity. Mentored engineers new to Scala and JVM concurrency.

Maintained Fastly's reverse HTTP proxy and cache. Led development of a sandboxing dynamic analysis runtime for the Fastly software stack, atop which the compiler, API, and security teams built custom analyzers.

Extended Twitter's Ruby and Java runtimes, improving the GC, JIT, and perf analysis tooling. Collaborated with service owners to diagnose performance issues. Maintained systems for antispam classification and actioning.

Organised the Systems+PL and the undergraduate systems reading groups. Applied Scientist intern in the Automated Reasoning & Database Services groups at AWS, working on distributed system model checking.

President of the CS Graduate Students' Association. Led department TA training. Appointed to the UBC Graduate Council. Organized the systems lab reading seminar. Service award recipient for my work supporting CPSC 110.

Undergraduate Association of CS board member. Chemistry domain expert for the 2008 Cluster Challenge team. Summer internship at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AICML), working on ML for adaptive user interfaces.