Dónal Murray
Engineering Lead at Parity Technologies
Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDónal Murray is an engineering lead and former physicist with 10 years of experience building robust software and firmware for high-stakes environments, from CERN experiments to blockchain infrastructure at Parity Technologies. He combines hands-on development in Python, C/C++, embedded systems and backend engineering with board-level strategic leadership, having founded and scaled a tech department and served as CTO. At Parity he improved benchmarking and testing for the Polkadot SDK, reflecting a penchant for improving developer tooling and reliability in open-source ecosystems. His academic background (PhD, physics) informs a rigorous, measurement-driven approach to system design and automation, demonstrated by CI/CD and testing work on medical and scientific devices. Colleagues describe him as a mentor who keeps coding while steering product and business strategy, and he brings an unusual mix of low-level embedded expertise and distributed systems experience to decentralised web infrastructure.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics at The University of ManchesterPhysics, Physics at Technical University Munich
German, English, Irish, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (8)
substrate10
benchmark10
benchmarking10
rust10
blockchain10
testing10
polkadot9
polkadot-js9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
paritytech/polkadot-sdk
Aug 2023 - Mar 2025
The Parity Polkadot Blockchain SDK
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 release, 485 reviews, 103 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Dónal primarily contributed to the `polkadot-sdk` repository by modifying and adding benchmarking tests for the HRMP pallet. They updated the HRMP pallet benchmarks to use Benchmarks v2, fixing minor misconfigurations, and adding event field names. Furthermore, the user made several code changes related to the StorageNoopGuard, including adding a custom error message and new alias and also added additional tests. The user's work demonstrates a focus on improving the benchmarking and testing infrastructure within the Polkadot blockchain SDK.
blockchaincumuluspolkadotsubstrate
seadanda/protonvpn-applet
Sep 2019 - Oct 2020
Unofficial basic systray applet for ProtonVPN written in python + PyQt5 with protonvpn-cli as a backend
Contributions:6 releases, 36 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year
pythonprotonvpn-clipyqt5backendpython3
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