Michael West
Software Engineer, Tools And Infrastructure at Google
Munich, Bavaria, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael West is a software engineer with 17 years’ experience focused on tools, infrastructure, and web security, currently building platforms at Google from his base in Munich. He combines deep standards and browser-security expertise—contributing to high-profile projects like WHATWG fetch, W3C WebAppSec/WebAuthn, web-platform-tests, and Chromium—with practical tooling work that improves developer workflows. His open-source contributions show a rare blend of specification authorship, backend enforcement algorithms, and front-end testing, including internationalization work on HTML5 Boilerplate and SRI/CSP integrations for Firefox and Chromium. Trained as a mathematician at Oxford (MMath, Double First), he brings rigorous, detail-oriented problem solving to large distributed systems and security protocols, and even spent early years working the frontline of customer service as a professional scooper—evidence of practical teamwork and humility.
17 years of coding experience
Lexington High SchoolMMath Mathematics, Mathematics, Double First, MMath Mathematics, Mathematics, Double First at University of Oxford
English, Spanish
Github Skills (44)
spec10
javascript10
content-security-policy10
api-design10
sec10
web-application-security10
webauthn10
csc10
testing10
it-security10
css10
http-header10
http10
internationalization10
security10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
w3c/webappsec
Dec 2013 - Jan 2023
Web Application Security Working Group repo
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:12 reviews, 1143 commits, 79 PRs in 9 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Michael's commits primarily focus on enhancing the security posture of the project. Contributions include modifications to implement a <code>cookie-scope</code> directive, and to the algorithms in the <code>Clear-Browsing-Data</code> and <code>Clear-Site-Data</code> headers, along with other aspects of the project. Their work involved strengthening the project's defenses against attacks, particularly those related to cross-site scripting and information leakage. They also provide examples to clarify the work.
web-application-securityapplication-securitysecurityweb-applicationattestation
w3c/webappsec-permissions-policy
May 2016 - Oct 2021
A mechanism to selectively enable and disable browser features and APIs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 5 pushes, 21 comments in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the implementation of the Feature Policy specification. They focused on defining and implementing enforcement algorithms for various features, including `cookie`, `domain`, and `sync-script`. The user also worked on integrating these policies with existing HTML specifications and added reporting functionalities for violation logging. Furthermore, they refactored the code to handle cascade targeting and origin-based targeting to enhance the flexibility of the system.
mechanismfirefoxbrowserjavascriptdisable
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