Alex Parent
Security Engineer at Square
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Parent is a Security Engineer with 15 years of experience blending applied research and production security work, currently at Square in Waterloo. He built deep expertise in post-quantum and reversible-computation projects through roles at ISARA, the Institute for Quantum Computing, and Microsoft Research. His open-source contributions to the well-known liboqs project include memory-leak fixes, build optimizations, and adding an AES-CTR-based RNG—work that improved stability and enabled safer prototyping of quantum-resistant algorithms. Alex combines low-level C systems skill with a physics and quantum information background from the University of Waterloo, making him adept at turning cutting-edge cryptographic research into robust code. He’s comfortable navigating both academic research environments and fast-paced engineering teams, often focusing on the subtle implementation details that make security primitives production-ready.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computational Science - Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computational Science - Physics at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (11)
c1710
algorithm10
algorithms10
c1110
cryptography10
makefile9
lattice8
memory-management8
crypt8
crypto8
aes8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
open-quantum-safe/liboqs
Aug 2016 - Jan 2017
C library for prototyping and experimenting with quantum-resistant cryptography
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 commits, 30 PRs, 8 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the codebase's efficiency and stability by addressing memory leaks and optimizing the build process. They simplified the Makefile to allow for better incremental builds, fixed memory leaks in the random number generator and key exchange code, and implemented code to work on post-quantum cryptography algorithms. The user also added a new random number generator based on AES-CTR, further demonstrating their contributions to the project's core cryptographic functionality. These contributions involved modifications to the core C library for post-quantum cryptography and key exchange algorithms.
post-quantumcryptographyexperimentingc-librarypublic-key-cryptography
QCT-IQC/qacg
Oct 2012 - Aug 2013
Contributions:58 commits in 10 months
arithmeticcircuitquantumquantum-computing
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