Katherine Yen
Software Engineer at Signal Messenger
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKatherine Yen is a software engineer based in San Francisco with three years of industry experience building backend systems for high-impact platforms. She has fought monetary fraud at Lyft's Integrity team and now contributes to Signal Messenger, working on server-side refactors, account management, and payment/subscription flows for the widely used Signal private messaging stack. Her work spans removing legacy features and improving reliability and observability—adding metrics like account idle time—and she implemented case-sensitive usernames and payment activation controls. A former UC Berkeley CS student and instructor, she brings a strong foundation in teaching and reproducible tooling to production engineering. Notably, her open-source contributions touch Signal Server, a prominent privacy-focused project, reflecting both engineering rigor and a commitment to secure, user-centered software.
3 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyLos Altos High School
Github Skills (19)
back-end-development10
java10
javas10
backend10
subscribe9
dynamodb9
subscriber9
amazon-dynamodb9
management9
manage9
rest-api8
api-rest8
testing8
restful-api8
api-design8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
signalapp/Signal-Server
Nov 2022 - Dec 2022
Server supporting the Signal Private Messenger applications on Android, Desktop, and iOS
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 15 pushes, 27 tags in 29 days
Contributions summary:Katherine's contributions focused on removing legacy features and refactoring the Signal server codebase, specifically related to the removal of groups v2 capabilities. They also implemented changes to enforce minimum donation amounts for one-time donations, indicating work on subscription and payment processing functionalities. Further changes involve enabling case-sensitive usernames and adding a metric for account idle time during reregistration, suggesting involvement in account management and system enhancements. The user also added a paymentActivation capability.
signalchatandroidiosdesktop
signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy
Feb 2025 - Feb 2025
Contributions:1 review, 1 PR, 1 push in 3 days
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