Sebastian Holzapfel
Principal Embedded Engineer at apf.audio
Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Holzapfel is a Principal Embedded Engineer with 11 years building safety-critical and performance-sensitive systems, currently shaping Vay’s teledriving stack using Rust, C and VHDL under ISO26262 practices. He brings deep low-level expertise from kernel and microcontroller work — contributions to seL4 and libopencm3 showcase platform ports, AArch64 Raspberry Pi support, USB and peripheral implementations, and kernel-level tracing. Past roles at Waymo and Data61 span LiDAR hardware-software integration, RTOS development, and high-density PCB design, reflecting a rare blend of embedded firmware, hardware design and manufacturing test systems. As founder of apf.audio he also designs open audio hardware, marrying practical product delivery with an open-source ethos. Based in Heidelberg, he combines academic tutoring and industry R&D experience with a knack for turning subtle hardware constraints into robust software and FPGA solutions. Not obviously visible from titles: he actively debugs platform-specific compiler and linker issues, demonstrating insistence on correctness at the toolchain and memory-map level.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at The Riverina Anglican CollegeUNSW Sydney
English, German
Stackoverflow
3,823reputation
861kreached
54answers
4questions
vector
top-5%
compilation
top-5%
boost
top-5%
Github Skills (43)
timers10
architecture10
computer-architecture10
cpu-architecture10
watchdog10
timer10
cortex-m10
usb10
c1110
microcontroller10
microkernel10
watchers10
c1710
kernel10
gpio10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
libopencm3/libopencm3
Feb 2018 - Jun 2018
Open source ARM Cortex-M microcontroller library
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 2 PRs, 17 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian contributed to the libopencm3 project, focusing on the EFM32 Happy Gecko microcontroller family. Their work involved implementing and integrating hardware-specific features like timers, watchdog timers, GPIO, and USB, as evidenced by the addition of corresponding implementations and memory map configurations. Furthermore, the user addressed a USB-related bug and added a test case, demonstrating a solid understanding of embedded systems development and peripheral interactions.
cortexstm32msp432microcontrollerjlink
seL4/seL4
Mar 2018 - Jun 2018
The seL4 microkernel
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer
Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:7 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily contributed to the seL4 microkernel project by implementing and modifying low-level system components and platform-specific configurations. This included fixing compilation issues related to the idle thread on ARM architecture by forcing specific optimization levels. Furthermore, the user added AArch64 support for the Raspberry Pi 3, including memory map definitions and linker script updates, and implemented user stack tracing functionality, demonstrating a deep understanding of the kernel and hardware interaction.
microkernelsel4-microkernelsel4os
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