Alina Chu
Senior Software Engineer at Sphere Labs
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlina Chu is a Senior Software Engineer in Seattle with eight years building secure, high-throughput systems at the intersection of trading and crypto. She’s shipped DeFi trading infrastructure at Uphold and now works on monetary-stability-focused crypto products at Sphere Labs, bringing trader instincts from seven years at Wolverine Trading to production engineering. Her open-source security work on Optimism—fixing chainId checks, reentrancy risks, Merkle trie bounds, and SafeMath/gas checks—underscores a strong focus on correctness and attack surface reduction in layer-2 systems. Earlier work includes rolling a searchable blockchain and applying data-science thinking to mobile ad exchanges, reflecting a blend of low-level protocol engineering and applied ML experience. She holds advanced engineering degrees from the University of Michigan and began her career doing AI research, a background that often surfaces in pragmatic, research-informed technical decisions.
8 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Unfinished) Artificial Intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Unfinished) Artificial Intelligence at University of Michigan College of Engineering
Github Skills (14)
audit-trail10
smart-contracts10
audit10
solidity10
merkle-tree10
opt10
auditing10
audit-logging10
code-auditing10
ethereum10
blockchain10
optim10
testing10
gas-optimization9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
ethereum-optimism/optimism
Nov 2020 - Dec 2020
Optimism is Ethereum, scaled.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:25 commits, 4 pushes, 1 branch in 22 days
Contributions summary:Alina primarily focused on improving the security and correctness of the smart contracts within the Optimism repository. Their commits addressed critical bugs related to chainId verification and potential reentrancy vulnerabilities in message passing. Further contributions included fixing bounds issues and improving the reliability of the Merkle Trie implementation, essential for data integrity within the optimistic rollup. The user also added and improved SafeMath and gas limit checks.
ethereumovmrollupl2-scaling
axchu/blxrt
Jul 2020 - Jun 2025
Contributions:4 pushes, 2 branches in 4 years 11 months
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