Anton Protopopov
Software Engineering Technical Leader at Isovalent
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAnton Protopopov is a Software Engineering Technical Leader based in Zurich with 11 years’ experience building networking, embedded and kernel-level systems and leading engineering teams. He combines hands-on expertise in eBPF/XDP and Linux kernel BPF subsystems—demonstrated by contributions to high-profile projects like torvalds/linux, Cilium and iovisor/bcc—with product delivery experience across cloud networking (Linode) and embedded video and OS projects. At Linode he built a team shipping customer-facing networking products and evangelized BPF internally; at Isovalent he now guides technical strategy and engineering execution. He’s equally comfortable in low-level C and system firmware as in shaping developer workflows and documentation, and has a track record of porting legacy tools to modern libbpf/CO-RE approaches. An interesting detail: his open-source work includes implementing router and ICMP echo logic in XDP tutorials and adding syscall-level BPF attributes to the kernel, reflecting both practical networking instincts and deep kernel internals knowledge.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at Moscow State Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation (Technical University) 
English, Russian
Github Skills (29)
debugging10
debug10
system-programming10
ebpf10
libbpf10
packet10
c1110
linux-kernel10
networking10
bpf10
security10
c1710
kernel10
go10
filter10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
cilium/cilium
Dec 2018 - Apr 2025
eBPF-based Networking, Security, and Observability
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:334 reviews, 33 PRs, 19 pushes in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Anton's contributions focused on enhancing the Cilium networking and security project. They addressed build issues related to LLVM, fixed a segmentation fault in the BPF filesystem handling, and added file and line information to drop notifications for improved debugging. The user also implemented improvements related to passing extended error codes with drop notifications, extended the DNS proxy, and fixed several code quality issues. Further work included addressing several data race conditions and code style issues.
bpfcontainerskerneltroubleshootingkubernetes-networking
iovisor/bcc
Jan 2020 - Jul 2022
BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 11 commits, 8 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Anton primarily contributed to the development and enhancement of BPF-based tools within the `iovisor/bcc` repository. Their work included refactoring existing tools like `bpflist` and converting tools like `vfsstat` and `tcpconnect` to their BPF CO-RE versions. These conversions involved significant code modifications to utilize the newer BPF CO-RE features and incorporate helper functions. The user also addressed build issues, improved code formatting, and added functionality to the `tcpconnect` tool, enhancing its capabilities.
bpfbcclinuxnetworkingebpf
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