Rudolf Polzer
Senior Cryptography Engineer at Google
Halifax, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRudolf Polzer is a Senior Cryptography Engineer with 17 years of experience building secure, high-performance systems across networking, media, and game engines. Now at Google working on BoringSSL integrations, he previously led streaming backend efforts for YouTube—covering storage, retrieval, CDN delivery, playability repair, and company-wide Go and privacy code reviews. His background spans deep systems work (SRE, IPv6, DNS, VMware, FreeBSD hardening) and applied cryptography, grounded in a diploma in Mathematics. An active open-source contributor, he has improved notable projects like mpv and the Ebitengine game library, often tackling platform-specific bugs and low-level rendering/encoding optimizations. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, security-first engineering that bridges research, tooling, and production at scale.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma Mathematics, Diploma Mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt
English, German, Latin
Stackoverflow
345reputation
460kreached
6answers
5questions
Github Skills (49)
editors10
c-language10
game-engine10
game-dev10
ffmpeg10
c1110
editor10
pad10
c1710
gamepad10
go10
encoding10
golang10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
mpv-player/mpv
Aug 2012 - Jun 2017
🎥 Command line media player
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:143 commits, 15 pushes, 5 branches in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Rudolf primarily contributed to the command-line media player's core functionality, making enhancements to its video output and encoding capabilities. Their work focused on fixing issues related to time-code handling, particularly in conjunction with features like chapter selection and timestamping. They also introduced a new option for controlling the maximum frame rate during encoding, allowing for more flexibility in managing video output. Furthermore, they updated the encoding code to use more recent ffmpeg APIs, improving code maintainability.
mpvlibavplayeraudiovideo-player
TTimo/GtkRadiant
Sep 2008 - Feb 2012
The open source, cross platform level editor for idtech games
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Rudolf primarily focused on fixing bugs and implementing features related to the tools used for the level editor. The contributions involved addressing typos, fixing memory leaks, and implementing features such as auto-leveling for the minimap. The user also made changes to the brush handling and shader processing within the Quake 3 map compilation tools, indicating a strong understanding of the underlying engine's data structures and processes.
fltkwindowsgamesmap-editortileset
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