Austin Abell
Senior Solutions Engineer at RISC Zero
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAustin Abell is a backend-focused software engineer with nine years of experience building and optimizing blockchain and distributed systems, currently working as a Senior Solutions Engineer at RISC Zero/Boundless in Toronto. He has led technical teams at ChainSafe and Near, shipping core protocol work across major open-source projects such as go-ethereum, Filecoin (Lotus and Forest), and NEAR, and has hands-on experience implementing VM logic, serialization, and CLI tooling. Austin’s strengths are refactoring legacy systems for performance and testability, and adding pragmatic developer-facing features like config management and improved testing infrastructure. He combines low-level systems fluency in Rust and Go with practical TypeScript tooling experience, and often contributes to protocol upgrades (EIPs/NEPs) and node implementations. Colleagues know him for turning intricate consensus and VM details into maintainable code and for enjoying the craft of “telling computers what to do.”
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Western University
Github Skills (34)
serializable10
serializer10
testing10
nearprotocol10
evm10
ip10
typescript10
test-framework10
virtual-machine10
data-structure10
serialization10
gas-optimization10
deserialization10
go10
filecoin10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
near/near-sdk-rs
Mar 2021 - Jan 2023
Rust library for writing NEAR smart contracts
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 526 reviews, 445 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Austin primarily focused on refactoring the logging functionality within the NEAR SDK for smart contracts. They modified and improved the implementation of logging by switching the internal representation to strings from bytes and updating the macro for more flexibility. Additionally, the user worked on implementing and optimizing aspects of the collections library, including an iterator that is useful for the `TreeMap` and the `Vector` implementation. These changes involved updating existing code.
rust-libraryethereumrustblockchainsmart-contracts
ChainSafe/forest
Nov 2019 - Apr 2021
🌲 Rust Filecoin Node Implementation
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:352 reviews, 362 commits, 630 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Austin focused on implementing and refactoring core functionalities within the Filecoin node implementation. Their work primarily involved setting up and defining various low-level components such as the virtual machine, blockchain subsystems, and message structures, as demonstrated by their creation of basic message types and handling of signatures. Moreover, the user refactored the address module and implemented its logic, contributing to the project's foundational infrastructure.
filecoinrustp2pblockchainnodejs
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