Thomas Holenstein
Software Engineer at Google
Uster, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Holenstein is a software engineer at Google with 12 years of experience, currently serving as technical lead for Google's internal cryptographic libraries and co-technical lead for the open-source Tink project. He specializes in backend cryptography engineering—serialization, key management, and secure APIs—and has contributed important correctness and format checks to Tink's core key handling. His background includes a PhD from ETH Zürich and academic roles as a professor in theoretical cryptography, plus postdoctoral research at Princeton and Microsoft, giving him deep theoretical foundations paired with production-grade implementation skills. Based in Uster, Zurich, he blends rigorous research pedigree with hands-on open-source stewardship, helping make cryptographic primitives harder to misuse in real-world systems.
12 years of coding experience
Doktor (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doktor (Ph.D.), Computer Science at ETH Zürich
Github Skills (14)
javas10
proto10
key-management10
encryption10
protobuf10
java10
protocol-buffers10
protobuffer10
cryptography9
serialization9
crypto9
data-serialization9
crypt9
algorithm9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
tink-crypto/tink
Sep 2018 - Jan 2023
Tink is a multi-language, cross-platform, open source library that provides cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er) to misuse.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:890 commits, 15 PRs, 13 pushes in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Thomas's contributions focus on the backend aspects of the Tink project, including the serialization and deserialization of keys. Their work involved registering a serialization for LegacyProtoKey within the MutableSerializationRegistry and JwkSetConverter. In addition, they made changes to key creation by ensuring that certain parameters are in a specific format. They also added checks in the KmsEnvelopeAeadKeyManager and JwtKeyManager and ensure that the correct functionality is implemented in the code.
securecryptographycppcross-languagemulti-language
tholenst/tink
Nov 2018 - Oct 2019
Tink is a multi-language, cross-platform library that provides cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er) to misuse.
Contributions:1 push, 3 branches in 10 months
securecryptographycross-languagemulti-languagecryptographic
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