Rick Altherr
Member Of Technical Staff at Anthropic
Monroe, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRick Altherr is a versatile Member of Technical Staff with 11+ years building low-level systems from ASIC debug and device drivers to distributed systems and UI design. He has led security and firmware efforts at Oxide and designed programming models for next-gen trapped-ion quantum computers at IonQ, bringing rare depth across hardware, networking, and software stacks. A prolific open-source contributor, Rick has improved projects such as OpenBMC, Yosys, prjxray and radare2—work that spans embedded build systems, FPGA bitstream tooling, and reverse-engineering utilities. He combines kernel- and firmware-level expertise (Linux kernel, device drivers, PKI/Root-of-Trust design) with applied performance analysis and time-sync/GNSS knowledge. Known for “building what others say is impossible,” he repeatedly refactors and optimizes complex flows to make robust, maintainable toolchains and images. Based in Monroe, WA, he thrives on hard engineering problems that bridge silicon, firmware, and distributed cloud systems.
11 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of CincinnatiHigh School, High School at Tinora
English
Github Skills (45)
algorithm10
algorithms10
verilog10
assembly10
c-language10
xilinx10
radare210
c1110
binarydiff10
data-structure10
yocto10
eda10
x8610
c1710
device-driver10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
f4pga/prjxray
Nov 2017 - Jun 2018
Documenting the Xilinx 7-series bit-stream format.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:157 commits, 41 PRs, 50 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily contributed to the project by adding and modifying code related to the Xilinx 7-series bitstream format. Their work included adding accessors to get words in a bitstream, fixing logic related to excluding known bits and tags, implementing bit manipulation functions, and replacing binary literals with hex literals for C++11 compatibility. The user also addressed a bug related to YAML decoding for configuration frame addresses, improved tool paths, and refactored code to improve code organization, reusability, and maintainability.
xilinxfpgaxilinx-fpgaartixartix7
oxidecomputer/hubris
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
A lightweight, memory-protected, message-passing kernel for deeply embedded systems.
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:1 release, 87 reviews, 64 commits in 2 years
Contributions summary:Rick primarily contributed to the `hubris` repository by adding and modifying code related to board-specific configurations and drivers for deeply embedded systems. Their work includes LED mappings, build configurations for new hardware platforms (gemini-bu-rot-1), and converting existing code to use `task_slot!` macros. The changes demonstrate a focus on adapting the kernel and its associated libraries to support various hardware targets and improve code organization. The user also contributed to the xTask build process.
embeddedkernelmessage-passing
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