Neal Poole
Security Engineer at Meta
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNeal Poole is a security engineer with 13 years of experience focused on web application security, vulnerability research, and secure software development. Based in New York, he has worked at Meta since 2013 and previously contributed to security consulting, internships, and teaching roles that blend practical offensive testing with developer-facing education. He brings deep hands-on knowledge across Java, PHP, Ruby, databases, and front-end technologies, enabling him to find and mitigate complex, multi-layer web vulnerabilities. Neal is also an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects like HHVM and fbthrift, where he implemented protocol and language features as well as subtle compiler and server fixes. That blend of production-scale systems work and low-level bug fixing means he can both harden large platforms and engineer targeted defenses. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic researcher who turns exploit insights into durable, testable improvements.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Sc.B. Computer Science, Sc.B. Computer Science at Brown University
Github Skills (11)
hacking10
php10
compiler-design10
thrift10
hhvm10
curl9
code-generation9
c-language8
cprogramming-language8
dns7
testing7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/hhvm
Aug 2014 - Jul 2022
A virtual machine for executing programs written in Hack.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:75 commits, 1 comment in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Neal contributed to the HHVM (Hack Virtual Machine) project by implementing features and fixing bugs related to various aspects of the system. They added support for the HTTP MOVE method in the HHVM Proxygen Server, which required modifications to the server-side code and tests. The user also introduced the `EnumClassAttribute` to Hack, adding support for enum classes and their associated attributes. Further work involved addressing a truncation issue in `stream_copy_to_stream` and adding support for CAA records via `dns_get_record` as well as updating ext_curl to include several Curl updates.
hacklangphpvirtual-machineprogramshhvm
facebook/fbthrift
Sep 2016 - Jul 2017
Facebook's branch of Apache Thrift, including a new C++ server.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Neal primarily contributed to the Facebook Thrift compiler, focusing on Hack language code generation. Their work included fixing issues in enum declarations to align with expected Hack syntax and introducing lazy initialization for constants. They also addressed compiler bugs related to string escaping and format strings, along with creating new test fixtures. These contributions improved the correctness and functionality of the Thrift compiler for Hack code generation.
cppapache-thriftc-plus-plusapachefacebook
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