Alan Jowett
Principal Software Design Engineer at Microsoft
Rathdrum, Idaho, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Jowett is a Principal Software Design Engineer at Microsoft with over two decades of experience designing and developing core components of Windows. He combines deep systems and kernel-mode expertise with hands-on contributions to high-profile open-source eBPF projects—adding security hardening, JIT refinements, and map support for the Windows eBPF implementation. Based in Rathdrum, Idaho, Alan brings a pragmatic systems engineering approach rooted in low-level programming and infrastructure work dating back to contract roles at Flextronics. Colleagues rely on him to navigate complex edge cases (e.g., division/modulo-by-zero handling and heap-spray mitigations) and to translate kernel concepts into robust user-level APIs and tooling.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Bachelor of Science at University Of South Africa
English, Afrikaans
Github Skills (17)
system-programming10
ebpf10
c1110
x8610
c1710
kernel10
x86-6410
compile10
windows-kernel10
jit10
assembly9
security9
ring-buffer9
hashtable9
arm9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
iovisor/ubpf
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Userspace eBPF VM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:314 reviews, 42 commits, 464 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the core functionality of the eBPF VM. Their work involved adding support for features like a string table and handling division and modulo by zero conditions. They also made changes to the JIT compilation process, and refactored jump handling mechanisms. Additionally, the user addressed security vulnerabilities by encoding BPF instructions to mitigate potential heap spray attacks.
ebpfuserspace
microsoft/ebpf-for-windows
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
eBPF implementation that runs on top of Windows
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Systems Engineer
Back-end Developer & Systems EngineerContributions:2315 reviews, 404 commits, 1526 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Alan's contributions primarily involve the eBPF implementation on Windows, demonstrating expertise in systems-level programming and kernel-mode development. Their commits include adding skeleton code for an enclave host, adding support for ring and hash map, implementing basic features for the user-level API and addressing bugs related to the project's core functionalities. The user also made changes related to the project's infrastructure.
ebpfwindows
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