Ken Mackay
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google DeepMind
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKen Mackay is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with over a decade of hands-on experience building real-time embedded systems, high-performance networking, audio/video platforms, and distributed systems across Google products and startups. He blends technical leadership and mentorship with deep systems programming expertise in C/C++, Python, Java, ARM assembly and Objective‑C, and has been the technical lead for Nest inter-device audio, Chromecast multiroom audio, and XR copresence at Google. His background spans OS-level work across Linux, QNX, FreeRTOS, macOS and Windows, and includes device drivers, cryptography and network security—visible in open-source contributions to the micro-ecc library where he improved ECDSA/ECDH support and deterministic signing. Comfortable leading cross-disciplinary teams, he has also built mesh networking, multipath routing and robotics platforms earlier in his career, inventing algorithms for dynamic queue sizing and prioritization. Now at Google DeepMind, he brings product-focused architectural judgment to complex, latency-sensitive systems while remaining an active contributor to low-level security and embedded tooling. Based in Mountain View, he combines rigorous academic roots in cognitive systems with a pragmatic, systems-first approach to shipping robust products.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Cognitive Systems, Bachelor of Science (BS) Cognitive Systems at The University of British Columbia
Github Skills (12)
crypto10
ecdsa10
ec10
arm10
elliptic-curve-cryptography10
assembly10
cryptography10
assembler10
security10
testing9
embedded8
sys8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
kmackay/micro-ecc
May 2013 - Mar 2022
ECDH and ECDSA for 8-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit processors.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:2 releases, 1 review, 127 commits in 9 years
Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributed to the core cryptography library, uECC, which provides ECDH and ECDSA functionalities. Their work involved modifying the underlying elliptic curve cryptography, including making changes to the default curves used and implementing new features for specific use cases like the LPC1114 board. They also added and updated test suites for ECDSA, and deterministic signing which are both related to improving security aspects of the library.
sdcc64-bit8-bitprocessors32-bit
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