George Kola
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGeorge Kola is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and systems architect with 18+ years of experience building high-performance, low-latency distributed systems and a PhD in Computer Science from UW–Madison. He’s led cross-platform real-time products at scale—redesigning Voxer’s client/server API to leverage SPDY/HTTP2 for dramatic latency, packet-loss and battery improvements and architecting Truveo’s search backend that served billions of queries with sub-100ms tail latency. At Google he drives large-scale telemetry and has taken Google Chat from prototype to production while leading shared sync and iOS teams and improving engineering throughput through structured design reviews and onboarding. He combines deep OS and networking expertise with hands-on performance profiling across C/C++/Objective‑C stacks, and contributes performance-focused fixes to notable open-source projects like Google’s Santa. Known for squeezing milliseconds out of critical paths, he excels at turning research-grade systems into production services used by tens of millions.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-MadisonB.E. Computer Science, B.E. Computer Science at College of Engineering, Guindy
English, Tamil
Github Skills (10)
c1710
macos10
c1110
security10
performance-optimization9
file-access8
hashing-algorithm8
file-handling8
file-processing8
fileio8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
google/santa
Jun 2016 - Jul 2016
A binary authorization and monitoring system for macOS
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 7 comments in 6 days
Contributions summary:George made several optimizations and performance improvements to the Santa macOS security system. Their commits focused on improving logging efficiency by utilizing pre-allocated memory and using `fwrite` for faster output. They also enhanced file hashing performance and corrected the handling of the `pread` function for more robust security checks. These changes demonstrate a focus on performance and reliability in the context of endpoint security.
objective-cauthorizationsecuritysantaallowlist
georgekola/santa
Jun 2016 - Jul 2016
Contributions:6 pushes, 5 branches in 5 days
whitelistingmac-osmacos-xmacos
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