Sean Heelan
R&D at Independent
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSean Heelan is an R&D leader and security-focused systems engineer with 13 years of experience building tooling for automated software analysis, profiling, and exploit research. He co-founded and led startups (Persistence Labs, optimyze) that delivered runtime program-analysis and always-on whole-system profiling, then scaled those capabilities into Elastic where he co-led the Universal Profiler and founded the Observability AI Assistant. His background combines a DPhil in Computer Science from Oxford with deep hands-on work in exploit development, symbolic/static/dynamic analysis, and low-level systems engineering. An active contributor to unicorn-engine, he has improved core emulator internals and Python bindings to harden CPU emulation and memory-event handling—an indicator of his comfort working across C/C++ internals and bindings. Currently he pursues independent R&D on LLMs and automated code reasoning with a security-first lens. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic researcher who turns formal verification and program analysis ideas into production-grade developer tools.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at University of OxfordBachelor of Science in Computer Systems (Honours) Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems (Honours) Software Engineering at University of Limerick
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (15)
c1710
cpu10
reverse-engineering10
c1110
emulation10
python9
web-framework8
app-framework8
application-framework8
x86-647
x867
arm7
security5
mips5
risc-v5
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
unicorn-engine/unicorn
Sep 2015 - Oct 2015
Unicorn CPU emulator framework (ARM, AArch64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, RiscV, S390x, TriCore, X86)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 comment, 2 issues in 14 days
Contributions summary:Sean primarily focused on refactoring and improving the Unicorn CPU emulator framework's internal structures and API consistency. They made changes to hook types, memory event handling, and related callback functions. Their work involved modifying core header files and Python bindings to ensure accurate and reliable execution and interaction with the emulator. The user also addressed identified issues and edge cases within the memory handling logic.
emulatorglibcarm64cpus390x
SeanHeelan/DotFiles
Jul 2015 - Oct 2023
Contributions:20 pushes, 1 branch in 8 years 4 months
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