Graeme Connell
Software Engineer at Signal Messenger
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGraeme Connell is a software engineer with 14 years of experience focused on security-sensitive, high-performance backend systems, currently contributing to Signal’s server-side work using hardware enclaves and HSMs to protect client privacy. He spent 15 years at Google across security, networking, payments, and Chronicle, where he led fast-moving teams to build B2B threat intelligence and investigation platforms. Graeme is an active open-source contributor to notable projects like google/btree and gopacket, optimizing core data structures and network packet parsing for measurable performance and correctness gains. His work spans from low-level packet capture and high-bandwidth storage (google/stenographer) to hardening systems that reduce access to sensitive information, reflecting a pragmatic blend of engineering and threat-aware design. Based in Victoria, BC, he pairs deep systems expertise with a clear operational mindset—improving build reliability, automations, and observability in production environments. Colleagues would describe him as a developer who surfaces non-obvious efficiencies (e.g., slice-insert optimizations and protocol-edge parsing) that yield outsized system improvements.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Middlebury College
English
Github Skills (24)
algorithm10
algorithms10
testing10
ip10
bash10
makefile10
data-structure10
go10
ipv610
performance-optimization10
ipv410
network-protocol10
tcp10
packet-analysis10
data-structures10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
google/gopacket
Dec 2016 - Apr 2021
Provides packet processing capabilities for Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 67 commits, 298 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Graeme primarily contributed to the `gopacket` library, working on improvements to parsing and processing network packets. Their work included enhancing the parsing of IPv4 and IPv6 packets, adding support for the Ethernet over Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) protocol, and adding support for IPv6 extensions like HopByHop, Routing, and destination options. They also addressed bugs in the existing TCP stream assembly code, implemented serialization functionalities, and added support for reading and writing PCAP files.
golangwiresharkdpdkpacket-processingpacket
google/stenographer
Oct 2014 - Jan 2019
Stenographer is a packet capture solution which aims to quickly spool all packets to disk, then provide simple, fast access to subsets of those packets. Discussion/announcements at stenographer@googlegroups.com
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 352 commits, 83 PRs in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Graeme primarily focused on improving the build process and overall reliability of the project. They refactored and improved the make scripts, including better handling of package installations, and the implementation of security features by setting capabilities. Furthermore, they addressed bugs, implemented verbose logging, and made modifications to the configuration files and systemd to allow for auto-starting. These contributions suggest a focus on streamlining development and enhancing stability and maintainability of the project.
announcementspacketsdiskpacket-capturepacket
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