Rolf Sommerhalder
ICT Network & Security Toolsmith at CrossCom Engineering
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRolf Sommerhalder is an ICT Network & Security Toolsmith with 13+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating hardened, identity‑based Internet infrastructures and Zero‑Trust architectures for hybrid and multi‑cloud environments. He blends deep systems-level expertise (OpenBSD/FreeBSD, microkernels, unikernels) with practical HashiCorp-driven orchestration patterns (Consul, Nomad, Vault, Boundary, Terraform) to deliver secure, scalable stacks that often replace heavier Kubernetes/Istio setups. His background spans high-performance packet work—including contributions to the Snabb project implementing Intel NIC drivers—telecom for humanitarian relief, SDR/DSP research, and HSM/crypto engineering. Rolf is equally at home prototyping embedded, minimal-TCB systems and leading enterprise migrations from perimeter security to dynamic identity-first models, and he frequently pairs R&D with capacity building and operational handover. A multilingual Swiss practitioner based in Zurich, he brings a rare mix of low-level radio/telecom know‑how and modern cloud-native security tooling to solve real-world resilience and privacy challenges.
13 years of coding experience
32 years of employment as a software developer
PhD. Candidate (not completed) Reliable Data Transmission over Fading Short-Wave (HF) Radio Channels, PhD. Candidate (not completed) Reliable Data Transmission over Fading Short-Wave (HF) Radio Channels at ETH Zürich
German, English, French
Github Skills (6)
lua10
device-driver10
networking10
userspace9
net9
luajit8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
snabbco/snabb
Dec 2015 - Jan 2016
Snabb: Simple and fast packet networking
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Engineer
Back-end Developer & System EngineerContributions:50 commits, 1 PR, 12 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Rolf contributed to the development of device drivers for Intel 1G network cards within the Snabb project. Their work focused on initializing and configuring the network interface cards (NICs), particularly the i210 and i350 models. The commits show implementation of PHY loopback for testing and include debugging information related to the MAC and PHY status. They also worked on adding counters and integrating them.
networkingluajituserspace-driveruserspace-networkingnfv-framework
hb9cwp/genode
Aug 2015 - Oct 2016
Contributions:2 PRs, 2 pushes in 1 year 1 month
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