William Findlay - Software Engineer at Isovalent

William Findlay

Software Engineer at Isovalent

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

William Findlay is a software engineer at Isovalent with nine years of experience building kernel-level security and observability for Kubernetes using eBPF. A PhD candidate and former CISL researcher at Carleton University, he blends rigorous academic research in OS security and intrusion detection with hands-on production engineering. He’s contributed to prominent open-source projects like iovisor/bcc, libbpf-rs, aya, and cilium/tetragon—adding ring buffer support, LSM/raw tracepoint features, and event filtering that improve performance and observability. Comfortable across back-end, DevOps, and full-stack tasks, he’s notable for translating low-level kernel introspection into deployable tooling for cloud-native environments. Based in Ottawa, he pairs deep Linux/kernel expertise with a track record of mentoring and teaching large university classes, reflecting both technical depth and strong communication skills.

9 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Carleton University

Github Skills (39)

kubernetes10

docker10

python10

ebpf10

testing10

libbpf10

packet10

linux-kernel10

dockers10

bpf10

cicd10

kernel10

automation10

go10

filter10

Programming languages (18)

SmartyC++CSSRustCQMakeTeXGo

Github contributions (5)

cilium/tetragon

May 2022 - Jan 2023

eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement

Role in this project:

Full-stack & DevOps Engineer

Contributions:1 release, 389 reviews, 203 commits in 8 months

Contributions summary:William Findlay's contributions primarily involved enhancing the eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement project, `cilium/tetragon`. He added scripts and configurations to bootstrap a new kind cluster and install Tetragon, demonstrating expertise in Kubernetes setup and deployment. Furthermore, he significantly contributed by implementing field filters for event exports, enabling customized event selection and exclusion, showcasing a deep understanding of the project's internal workings and event processing. The commits also contained the refactoring of metrics, with kprobe, ringbuf, and eventcache metrics being moved into their own packages to increase readability.

bpfkernelenforcementsecurityruntime

libbpf/libbpf-rs

Jan 2021 - May 2022

Minimal and opinionated eBPF tooling for the Rust ecosystem

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:40 reviews, 20 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 3 months

Contributions summary:William implemented ringbuf support, a key feature for efficient data transfer in eBPF programs. This involved adding ringbuf support, bumping the libbpf-sys version, and updating tests to incorporate ringbuf functionality and new test object files. They modified test files to include ringbuf tests with BPF source files, demonstrating a focus on eBPF program development and testing within the Rust ecosystem. Additionally, they made significant code changes across multiple commits to further build out core functionality within the libbpf-rs project.

bpfrustebpfecosystemlibbpf

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