Paul Lietar
Senior Research Software Engineer at Imperial College London
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Lietar is a Senior Research Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building and hardening low-level, distributed and systems software across industry and academia. He has contributed to high-profile open-source projects and research efforts—working on language runtimes (Microsoft's Verona), allocators (snmalloc), and protocol implementations (librespot)—often solving platform-specific portability and performance issues. His background spans research roles at Microsoft and Imperial College London, production engineering at Cloudflare and Google, and a PhD-to-industry trajectory that blends rigorous experimentation with shipping resilient systems. Paul is fluent in tackling compiler, VM and concurrency problems, from fixing cross-platform compilation and CPU affinity code to reworking bytecode and VM internals. Colleagues value his knack for turning tricky correctness edge cases into maintainable fixes and for improving build and runtime performance in tightly constrained codebases. Based in the UK, he combines research-grade thinking with practical engineering impact on real-world distributed systems.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Mathematics and computer science, Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Mathematics and computer science at Imperial College LondonScientific Baccalaureat Science and Engineering, Scientific Baccalaureat Science and Engineering at Lycée Pierre Termier Grenoble
French, English, Spanish
Github Skills (56)
programming-language10
c-language10
compiler-development10
memory-management10
user-authentication10
authentication10
spotify-api10
c1110
networking10
data-structure10
c1710
type-system10
compiler-design10
pulseaudio10
sys10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
plietar/librespot
Mar 2015 - Oct 2017
Open Source Spotify client library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:313 commits, 79 PRs, 234 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Paul contributed significantly to the core functionality of a Spotify client library, focusing on the authentication and protocol handshake processes. Their work involved implementing key exchange and authentication mechanisms, refactoring code for build time optimization, and improving the flexibility of login information handling. The user also worked on defining and implementing the core protocol messages, including the support for album cover downloads.
client-libraryspotifyspotify-web-apispotify-clientspotify-api
librespot-org/librespot
Jan 2018 - Jun 2021
Open Source Spotify client library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 13 PRs, 13 pushes in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily worked on implementing the Spotify client library, specifically focusing on the protocol handshake and authentication processes. Their contributions included the initial implementation of key exchange, authentication functionality, and the restructuring of protocol definitions into separate crates to improve build times. Furthermore, the user made changes to the authentication and key exchange mechanisms, including the addition of Facebook login support, and also added support for new mercury subscription protocol. This involved the modification of protocol definition files, and changes to the data structures used for handling of authentication and key exchange.
librespotrustclient-libraryspotifyspotify-connect
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