Alexander Theißen
Senior Tech Lead at Parity Technologies
Berlin, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Theißen is a Senior Tech Lead with 11 years of systems and blockchain engineering experience, currently leading Parity Technologies' smart contract efforts from Berlin. He combines low-level systems expertise—previously as a Linux kernel developer focused on security—with deep practical knowledge of Rust and Substrate-based runtimes. His open-source contributions include backend work on Polkadot, Substrate, Cumulus and the ink! smart contract framework, where he implemented contract runtime calls, fixed gas/weight issues, and improved tooling and examples. Known for shipping pragmatic low-level fixes (e.g., nested storage transactions, ext_transfer/ext_terminate) he bridges runtime internals and developer ergonomics. He advocates Rust for systems programming and routinely tackles the inner workings of blockchain execution environments. Collected academic training from RWTH Aachen and University of Münster underpins his combination of research-driven curiosity and production-grade delivery.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at University of MünsterMaster of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University
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Github Skills (27)
substrate10
pallet10
clientside10
rpc10
polkadot-js10
blockchain10
smart-contracts10
webclient10
blazor-webassembly10
nodejs10
webassembly10
rust10
polkadot10
nodes10
json9
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
paritytech/polkadot-sdk
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
The Parity Polkadot Blockchain SDK
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:556 reviews, 124 PRs, 309 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily contributed to the back-end development of the Parity Polkadot Blockchain SDK, particularly focusing on the Contracts module. The user's commits introduced new features, such as the `ext_transfer` call for sending balances and the `ext_terminate` call for self-destruction, and revamped existing functionalities like the contracts runtime API. They demonstrated the ability to work with the low-level details and inner workings of the project and make improvements to existing functionality.
blockchaincumuluspolkadotsubstrate
paritytech/substrate
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Substrate: The platform for blockchain innovators
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:974 reviews, 170 commits, 219 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alexander's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the contract-related functionalities within the Substrate blockchain platform. They implemented the `ext_transfer` call, allowing contracts to send balances to any account, and added the `ext_terminate` call for self-destruction. They also addressed out-of-gas errors within contracts, ensuring proper error messages. The commits further include improvements such as optimizing weights and incorporating the new Wasmi implementation.
substraterustblockchainparitypolkadot
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