Clemens Backes
Software Engineer at Google
Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolClemens Backes is a software engineer with 17 years of experience specializing in low-level runtime and WebAssembly engineering, currently working on V8 at Google from Bavaria, Germany. He brings deep expertise in VM internals, Wasm integration and performance optimization, having contributed to flagship projects like Node.js, Chromium and V8 where he implemented job APIs, removed deprecated V8 internals and improved Wasm compilation paths. His background includes a PhD-era research focus on automatic and speculative parallelization, including a kernel-assisted virtual-memory approach, which informs his pragmatic systems-level troubleshooting. Clemens also contributes to fuzzing and test infrastructure (ClusterFuzz, WebAssembly spec) to harden crash analysis and test coverage, reflecting a security-aware, correctness-first mindset. Notably, he combines academic rigor with production-grade change across some of the most widely used open-source runtimes in the world.
17 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Universität des Saarlandes
English, German
Github Skills (28)
javascript10
assembly10
c-language10
runtimes10
python10
testing10
v810
chromium10
security10
regular-expression10
compiler-compiler10
vulnerability-detection10
javascript-engine10
x86-6410
compiler10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
google/clusterfuzz
Apr 2021 - Aug 2022
Scalable fuzzing infrastructure.
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 6 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Clemens contributed to the `google/clusterfuzz` repository, focusing on enhancing the crash analysis and vulnerability detection capabilities. Their commits primarily addressed issues related to identifying and classifying crash types, particularly within the V8 JavaScript engine. This included modifying code to correctly report V8 API errors, sandbox violations, and out-of-memory conditions. Furthermore, they refined the system's ability to detect and report various types of failures, such as CHECK failures and generic segfaults, while also improving handling of specific error messages.
scalablevulnerabilitiessecurityinfrastructurefuzzing
WebAssembly/spec
Jun 2017 - Jun 2020
WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 8 commits, 30 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Clemens primarily contributed to the WebAssembly specification repository by modifying the `wasm-module-builder.js` file, which appears to be a tool for constructing WebAssembly modules. Their work included updating the builder to sync with a V8 version, and fixes for endianness problems. In addition to builder code changes, the user added tests related to control instructions in unreachable code and fixed specification issues, which improved test coverage and corrected a specification error.
rustspecificationwebassemblyinterpretersuite
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