Karl Hiramoto
Staff Software Engineer at VirusTotal
Marbella, Andalusia, Spain
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarl Hiramoto is a Staff Software Engineer with 26 years of experience building across embedded systems, Linux/Unix platforms, electronics, and scalable cloud services, currently working at Google and contributing to VirusTotal. He combines low-level expertise—kernel drivers, bootloader bring-up, and embedded Linux—with higher-level product design, automation, and large-scale data engineering gained from projects handling billion-row datasets. A pragmatic polyglot (C, C++, Python, JavaScript, C#) who has reduced boot times, implemented hardware-accelerated crypto, and shipped MacOS analysis tools, he bridges firmware and cloud with equal fluency. Karl is also an active open-source contributor, having improved file-type detection in the widely used sindresorhus/file-type project, demonstrating attention to interoperability and tooling quality. Based in Marbella, he pairs deep technical craftsmanship with product-minded systems thinking, often surfacing non-obvious optimizations that simplify long-term maintenance.
26 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
UMass LowellComputer Engineering Computer Engineering, Computer Engineering Computer Engineering at South Dakota MinesMannheim American High School
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
317reputation
54kreached
13answers
1question
Github Skills (11)
nodejs10
javascript10
buffer10
buffering10
filename9
sql-server6
linux6
md56
database-design6
mysql6
enums6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
sindresorhus/file-type
May 2017 - Oct 2018
Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 10 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Karl primarily contributed to the `file-type` repository by adding support for various file format detections. They enhanced the project by identifying file types like QuickTime, MP4 variants, MP3 headers, OGG containers, MPEG, and QCP audio files. The contributions involved modifications to the `index.js` and `test.js` files, incorporating new header checks and associated test cases to improve the accuracy of file type identification.
bufferuint8arrayfile-typemagicjavascript
karlhiramoto/nfqwf
Mar 2010 - Sep 2012
Contributions:80 commits in 2 years 6 months
web-basedlinuxfilter
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