Rafael Rivera
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarRafael Rivera is a senior software engineer with 15 years building secure, production-grade software for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, holding an active security clearance and deep expertise in Windows development. A longtime Windows-focused open-source contributor and Microsoft MVP alum, he has played key backend roles on high-profile projects such as windows-rs and win32metadata, improving metadata generation and Rust/Win32 interoperability. Rafael’s contributions span tooling, debugging, and security—adding PDB support to reverse-engineering tools, hardening Frida on Windows, and evolving mach2’s core feature controls. Based in Redmond, he combines low-level systems knowledge with practical security engineering, often solving platform-specific edge cases that others miss. He’s also an author and mentor who enjoys sharing hard-won Windows internals knowledge with the community.
15 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
871reputation
42kreached
14answers
2questions
Github Skills (39)
debugging10
c-language10
wp-api10
windows10
metadata10
instrumentation10
winapi10
c1110
binarydiff10
c1710
windows-sdk10
dotnet-core10
rust10
ws-api10
reverse-engineering10
Programming languages (35)
Github contributions (5)
riverar/mach2
Apr 2018 - Jan 2023
Windows Feature Control Multi-tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 1 review, 217 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Rafael appears to be focused on building and maintaining the core functionality of the mach2 project. Their work involved the addition of a new library as well as the identification and implementation of features based on information from the symbol files. The code differences suggest the user made changes across many different files.
windowsfeature-controlprocess-monitorwindows-10multi-tool
microsoft/win32metadata
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Tooling to generate metadata for Win32 APIs in the Windows SDK.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:134 reviews, 58 commits, 121 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Rafael primarily contributed to the `microsoft/win32metadata` repository by implementing enhancements related to metadata generation for Win32 APIs. Their work included adding null checks and incorporating flags for console input modes and DIA excludes. The user also made adjustments to the emission of attributes and made corrections to lib mappings.
windowswindows-sdk
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