Nathan Taylor

Performance lead for Semgrep's static analysis engine, improving median and tail scan times by 3x and reducing the MCP server's latency by over 4x. Led the engine migration to Multicore OCaml. Maintained Semgrep's custom OCaml compiler and stdlib.

Researched lightweight formal methods for validation of systems software. Verified crash consistency of a persistent memory filesystem, and mechanised validating an optimised Paxos implementation against its correctness proof.

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 combines 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 libraries 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. Designed and built 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.

Executive on the Undergraduate Association of Computing Science board. Acted as the U of A's Cluster Challenge Team's chemistry domain expert.