Namhyung Kim
Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNamhyung Kim is a seasoned software engineer with 17 years of deep expertise in Linux kernel and systems programming, currently building kernel/perf tools at Google in San Francisco. He combines strong C skills, performance analysis techniques, and a track record of shipping low-level tooling—authoring open-source projects like uftrace and contributing to high-profile repositories including torvalds/linux and iovisor/bcc. His work spans kernel tracing, BPF-enabled observability, and filesystem and util-linux fixes, often focusing on performance, stability, and cleanups that prevent memory leaks and compiler warnings. At LG he drove major perf features and refactors, and earlier roles covered embedded system bring-up and product-level debugging, giving him a rare breadth from board support to kernel tooling. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, low-overhead tracing solutions (e.g., light-weight tracers and powertop improvements) that reveal hard-to-see performance bottlenecks. He also has a history of teaching kernel architecture, blending hands-on development with community-facing open-source stewardship.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BS), Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Seoul
English, Korean
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (29)
debugging10
filesystem10
c-language10
system-programming10
memory-management10
linux10
build-system10
packet10
c1110
linux-kernel10
bpf10
c1710
kernel10
system10
performance-analysis10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
iovisor/bcc
Feb 2022 - Oct 2022
BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Systems Engineer
Back-end Developer & Systems EngineerContributions:10 reviews, 8 commits, 6 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Namhyung primarily contributed to the `klockstat` and `biolatency` tools, which are part of the broader BCC (BPF Compiler Collection) project. Their work involved adding features for tracking kernel lock contention and improving the accuracy of performance metrics, specifically for rwsem and per-thread statistics. The user also addressed a compiler warning and refined the tools by utilizing BTF for more robust tracepoint handling. These changes demonstrate a focus on optimizing system monitoring tools.
bpflinuxmonitoringnetworking
wkz/ply
Aug 2021 - Nov 2021
Light-weight Dynamic Tracer for Linux
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Namhyung primarily focused on enhancing the `ply` project, a light-weight dynamic tracer for Linux. Their contributions involved refactoring the code to use lists for providers and built-ins, improving static linking. They added new functionalities, such as the 'sum' aggregation function and the 'interval' provider, extending the tool's capabilities for data aggregation and periodic actions. Furthermore, the user addressed several bugs and added support for BEGIN and END probes, demonstrating a focus on stability and feature enhancement.
linux
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