Jiarun Mao
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJiarun Mao is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and final-year PhD in computer science specializing in computer networks, based in California with a decade of engineering experience. He has production experience at Meta, where he rebuilt critical DNS microservices in Go and improved performance by over 60%, and now applies that expertise at Palo Alto Networks. His research blends large-scale Internet measurement and systems work—building a custom high-performance DNS scanner and authoritative server to study TCP fallback among IPv4 resolvers—and has led to collaborations and publications with Akamai and IETF venues. A prolific contributor to the Zeek network analysis framework, he has advanced DNS protocol parsing (EDNS, SVCB), DNS cookies, and TCP keepalive support, demonstrating both security-mindedness and attention to testability. Comfortable in Go, C++, and Python, he pairs low-level protocol insight with pragmatic engineering for operationally critical network infrastructure.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Case Western Reserve UniversityUniversity of California, Irvine
English, Chinese
Github Skills (14)
network-security10
zeek10
network-monitoring10
dns10
security10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
packet-analysis9
pcap8
bro8
dfu7
dfd7
dfa7
dfm7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
zeek/zeek
Aug 2020 - Oct 2021
Zeek is a powerful network analysis framework that is much different from the typical IDS you may know.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:24 commits, 2 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Jiarun primarily contributed to the Zeek network analysis framework by implementing and refining DNS protocol parsing, specifically focusing on EDNS and SVCB records, demonstrating an understanding of network protocols. They added support for DNS cookies and TCP keepalive, improving Zeek's ability to handle advanced DNS features. Additionally, the user enhanced documentation and added test cases, showing a focus on code quality and maintainability within a security-focused framework.
dfirnsmsecurityanalysisnetworking
FlyingWithJerome/Permission_Based_Malware_Detector-PBMD-
Apr 2018 - May 2018
Contributions:18 commits, 16 pushes, 1 branch in 10 days
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.