Alexander Eyers-taylor
Research Engineer at XBOW
Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Eyers-taylor is a research engineer with 11 years' experience building developer-facing analysis tools, currently based in Oxford and recently joining XBOW after six years as a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub. He has deep expertise in CodeQL and related tooling, contributing language-spec enhancements, refactors, and documentation to the widely used CodeQL codebase and its VS Code extension. His work spans language design, compiler-like query compilation fixes, and backend engineering to improve code-scanning accuracy and maintainability. Earlier roles at Semmle, including an internship where he implemented a faster transitive-closure algorithm, reflect a strong foundation in program analysis and algorithmic thinking. Colleagues know him for clarifying complex systems through careful refactoring and for bridging research ideas into production-quality tooling. He combines Oxford-trained theoretical rigor with practical open-source impact on security-focused developer workflows.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
MMathCompsci Mathematics and Computer Science, MMathCompsci Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Oxford
Github Skills (9)
github-advanced-security10
vscode-extension10
semmle-ql10
codeql10
typescript-types9
python9
typescript9
typescripts9
sql6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
github/vscode-codeql
May 2019 - Dec 2022
An extension for Visual Studio Code that adds rich language support for CodeQL
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 121 commits, 69 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily focused on modifying the CodeQL extension for Visual Studio Code. Their contributions involved refactoring code to improve clarity, such as renaming variables. They also addressed file naming inconsistencies within the query compilation process. Furthermore, they implemented changes to the interface, ensuring accurate display and interpretation of results.
visual-studio-codevscodevscode-extensionlanguage-supportworks-with-codespaces
github/codeql
Sep 2018 - Jan 2023
CodeQL: the libraries and queries that power security researchers around the world, as well as code scanning in GitHub Advanced Security
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:89 reviews, 68 commits, 123 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily contributed to the CodeQL project by making changes to the QL language specification and addressing code quality issues. These changes included adding features to the QL language, fixing binding predicates in Python code, and addressing comments from code reviews. The user's work also involved improving documentation and refactoring parts of the codebase to enhance readability and maintainability.
github-advanced-securitysecurity-toolsgithub-security-labsecurity-researcherssecurity
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