Paul Semel
Senior Software Engineering at Google
Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Semel is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in low-level systems, security, and performance tooling, currently working on sandboxing technologies at Google in Switzerland. He has a strong background in C++ static and dynamic analysis—authoring tools and policies in Chrome to ban dangling pointers and detect iterator misuse—and experience improving profiling and PGO workflows from his time at Apple. Paul contributes to high-profile open-source projects like ClusterFuzz and Datadog Agent, where his backend and DevOps work enhanced fuzzing infrastructure and HTTP telemetry for production monitoring. His resume spans hypervisor security work at AWS, LLVM binutils improvements via Google Summer of Code, and teaching C/Unix fundamentals, reflecting both deep technical breadth and a knack for practical engineering education. Notably, he blends research-style static analysis with hands-on infra improvements, making him effective at turning security research into deployable tooling. Based in Switzerland, he pairs a pragmatic systems focus with a history of impactful open-source contributions.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
EPITA: Ecole d'Ingénieurs en InformatiqueInformation Technology, Information Technology at California State University, Monterey BayHypokhâgne B/L, Littérature, Hypokhâgne B/L, Littérature at Lycée Claude Monet
Github Skills (13)
fuzzing10
vulnerabilities10
docker10
observability10
go10
python10
dockers10
ebpf10
metric10
security10
networking9
distributed-tracing9
go-testing8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
google/clusterfuzz
Oct 2023 - Mar 2025
Scalable fuzzing infrastructure.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:47 reviews, 43 PRs, 72 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Paul's contributions primarily focused on improving the `clusterfuzz` infrastructure, demonstrating expertise in fuzzing and security. They implemented features to enhance libFuzzer, including increasing memory limits, and added support for centipede options files. They also addressed build and infrastructure-related issues, such as adding support for specific binaries, and reworked argument handling for enhanced clarity. These changes improved the efficiency and functionality of the fuzzing infrastructure.
scalablevulnerabilitiessecurityinfrastructurefuzzing
DataDog/datadog-agent
Mar 2022 - Jun 2022
Main repository for Datadog Agent
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 14 commits, 17 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the system-probe component, focusing on enhancing HTTP traffic monitoring and telemetry. Their work involved adding telemetry for dropped and missed HTTP requests, as well as ensuring data correctness by validating the path format and the HTTP verb. Furthermore, the user worked on adding register features to system-probe and optimizing code related to the HTTP buffer. These changes also included improvements to HTTP buffer size and struct size.
golangdatadog-agentagentobservabilitypmm
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