Michael Kruskal
Staff Software Engineer at Google
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Kruskal is a Staff Software Engineer at Google with two decades of programming passion and a formal background culminating in a PhD in high energy physics. He brings practical systems and build expertise to core languages and protobuf, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Abseil, and upb with cross-platform build fixes, dependency management, and logging improvements. At Google he advanced from software engineer to staff work on Protobuf and previously helped scale Assistant infrastructure policy tooling; before that he drove performance-sensitive simulation and scheduling work at MathWorks. Comfortable across C/C++ and build systems, he focuses on maintainability, cross-platform compatibility, and reducing compiler and CI friction. Colleagues value his scientist’s rigor and curiosity applied to production-grade tooling and long-lived infrastructure. Unusually for an engineer with a PhD, he has consistently chosen hands-on engineering over academia, translating research discipline into robust engineering practices.
6 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityMaster’s Degree, Physics, 3.68, Master’s Degree, Physics, 3.68 at Boston University
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (28)
dependency-management10
objective-c10
c-language10
lib10
testing10
macros10
build-system10
cmake10
logger10
c1110
java10
c1710
javas10
code-generation10
compiler-compiler10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
protocolbuffers/protobuf
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:12 releases, 680 reviews, 235 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the protobuf project by merging updates to third-party dependencies, specifically for the UTF8 range library. These changes include updates to the CMake configuration and installation files, suggesting an involvement in the project's build system and dependency management. Additionally, the user was responsible for fixing a build issue related to a windows platform, demonstrating experience with cross-platform build environments.
protocol-buffersrpcgoogle-protocol-buffersinterchange-formatmarshalling
protocolbuffers/upb
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
a small protobuf implementation in C
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 35 commits, 38 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the build system and dependency management of the protobuf implementation in C. Their work included bumping protobuf dependencies to newer versions and modifying build files to incorporate changes, and adding support for local builds of python wheels. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to python version compatibility and improved the system's ability to handle environments lacking a system python installation. These changes suggest a focus on maintaining and improving the project's build process.
protocol-buffersprotobufflatbuffersprotobuf3protoc
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