Matthew Brecknell
Software Verification Engineer
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Brecknell is a software verification engineer with 14 years of experience specialising in formal specification and mechanised proofs for real-world systems, most notably the seL4 microkernel. Based in Sydney, he has led and contributed to high-assurance verification projects at NICTA/Data61 and Kry10, developing techniques for cross-architecture proofs, RISC-V binary verification, and mixed-criticality real-time systems. A founding member of the seL4 Foundation TSC, he shapes technical direction and community standards while mentoring teams to apply proof engineering in production software. His open-source contributions to the flagship seL4 repo include kernel-level improvements, architecture-specific ports for x86-64 and RISC-V, and tooling optimisations that speed up proof generation. Matthew combines deep theoretical rigour with pragmatic engineering—removing redundant kernel checks and automating verification pipelines to make formally verified systems more efficient and maintainable.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering (Honours I) Computer Systems Software, Bachelor of Engineering (Honours I) Computer Systems Software at The University of Queensland
Stackoverflow
695reputation
239kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (14)
c1710
macos10
c1110
microkernel10
sel410
osdev10
x86-649
x869
risc-v9
code-generation8
factory-method6
design-patterns6
foreach6
idioms6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
seL4/seL4
Sep 2016 - Dec 2022
The seL4 microkernel
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:69 reviews, 41 commits, 28 PRs in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily focused on the seL4 microkernel, contributing to its core functionality. Their work involved removing redundant checks within the kernel's TCB (Thread Control Block) management, including priority and MCP checks. They also improved the efficiency of code generation tools, specifically for bitfield handling, optimizing proofs and the generation of `*_new` and `*_ptr_new` functions for blocks and unions. Furthermore, the user made several changes related to architecture-specific code for x86-64 and RISC-V.
microkernelsel4-microkernelsel4os
seL4/graph-refine
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Contributions:7 reviews, 60 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 11 months
refinement-prooftranslation-validationsel4
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.