Daniel Kroening
Senior Principal Scientist at Diffblue
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Kroening is a Senior Principal Scientist based in Seattle with 11 years of industry experience and a long academic pedigree, including a summa cum laude PhD and a decade as a Professor of Computer Science at Oxford. He co-founded Diffblue and served as its CEO, blending entrepreneurship with deep technical expertise in program analysis, automated reasoning, and generative AI for code. At AWS he focuses on research-driven engineering, applying formal methods to real-world systems and contributing to high-impact open-source projects like the CBMC bounded model checker. His CBMC work added SMT-LIB2 bit-vector comparisons, modular arithmetic, and advanced handling of quantifiers and C front-end features—improvements that strengthen automated verification for C codebases. Comfortable shifting between theoretical foundations and production back-ends, he also contributes to infrastructure tooling such as the Amazon SSM Agent, improving security and cross-platform operability. This combination of research, product leadership, and hands-on compiler/verification engineering makes him unusually effective at turning formal techniques into production-grade developer tools.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude, PhD, Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude at Universität des Saarlandes
German, English, French, Russian
Github Skills (17)
c-language10
develop10
unix10
configuration-management10
linux10
compiler-design10
agent10
go10
formal-verification10
cprogramming-language10
security9
logical9
code-generation9
logic9
symbolic-logic9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
diffblue/cbmc
Sep 2020 - Jan 2023
C Bounded Model Checker
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Compiler Engineer
Back-end Developer & Compiler EngineerContributions:2 releases, 902 reviews, 683 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Daniel's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the CBMC bounded model checker, a tool for verifying C programs. Their work involved implementing new functionalities, specifically adding support for SMT-LIB2 bit-vector comparisons, modular arithmetic, and for handling quantifiers in lambda expressions. The user also made code improvements related to C's "pointer - scalar" operations and expanded support for the C front-end, enabling the handling of features such as contracts on function declarations and correct parsing and formatting of expressions.
model-checkermodel-checkingcppcheckertla
aws/amazon-ssm-agent
Nov 2021 - Jan 2022
An agent to enable remote management of your EC2 instances, on-premises servers, or virtual machines (VMs).
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 comment in 1 month
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on modifying the SSM agent's internal configuration and operational logic. Their contributions involved refactoring directory paths, implementing permission improvements, and altering variable declarations for improved testing flexibility. These changes included adjustments to the Darwin and Unix specific configurations and the introduction of security-related enhancements by enabling sessions when the agent runs without root privileges.
virtual-machine
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