Paul Hadfield
Senior Developer at Government Digital Service
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Hadfield is a senior software engineer with 14+ years building mobile and back-end systems across startups and large organisations, currently working at the UK Government Digital Service after multi-year senior roles at Google. He brings deep systems and architectural experience in Ruby, Java and C++ and a strong track record shipping scalable, auditable services (including contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Trillian and Certificate Transparency). Comfortable across mobile stacks (Android, Symbian, some iOS) and big-data tooling (Hadoop, MapReduce), he pairs hands-on coding with mentoring and technical leadership in small agile teams. Chartered as a CEng and MIET, he also focuses on operational reliability—CI, monitoring and infra automation—and has a taste for low-level protocol work dating back to Symbian-era HTTP/SYNC implementations. Outside work he’s a dad and plays saxophone, and his GitHub shows a pragmatic attention to cryptographic integrity and backend robustness rather than flashy front-ends.
14 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
BA (Hons), Electrical and Information Sciences (EIST), BA (Hons), Electrical and Information Sciences (EIST) at University of CambridgeA-levels, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, A-levels, Maths, Physics, Chemistry at Beauchamp College
French
Github Skills (18)
c-language10
data-structure10
go10
data-structures10
cprogramming-language10
protobuffer10
protobuf10
testing9
apidoc9
distributed-systems9
http9
api9
logging9
hash-functions8
api-design8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
google/certificate-transparency
Dec 2014 - Jun 2017
Auditing for TLS certificates.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:61 commits, 77 PRs, 45 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the back-end components of the Certificate Transparency project. Their work included improving code indentation and removing unused variables, indicating code cleanup and maintenance efforts. They also implemented HTTP request logging, which suggests a focus on server-side monitoring and debugging. Furthermore, the user fixed bugs related to HTTP methods in several APIs, improving the overall reliability and robustness of the system.
letsencryptsslsecuritycertificate-transparencytls
google/trillian
Sep 2016 - Dec 2017
A transparent, highly scalable and cryptographically verifiable data store.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 44 PRs, 24 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributes to the `trillian` repository, which involves cryptographic verification and data storage. Their work centers around improving the compact Merkle tree implementation, specifically adding the ability to generate hashes of the tree's nodes. The user also refactored tests, introduced new test data for the Merkle tree, and fixed some failure outputs in tests. The user's contributions involve modifying and extending the codebase and test framework to enhance the overall robustness and functionality of the Merkle tree implementation.
verifiablecryptographyscalabletransparentcertificate-transparency
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