Zhen Lian
Software Engineer at Block
Fremont, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZhen Lian is a security-focused software engineer with nine years of experience building and hardening transport and identity systems at Block, Google, and Yahoo. He specializes in TLS/ALTS, credential management, and IAM for cloud-native environments, contributing production-grade features like credential reloading, CRL checks, and an authorization/auditing framework for gRPC. An active open-source maintainer, Zhen’s contributions to grpc, grpc-java, and grpc-go improved advanced TLS handshakes, Netty integration, and end-to-end test coverage for one of CNCF’s most widely used RPC frameworks. At Block he applies that expertise to IAM across multi-cloud deployments (GCP/AWS) and Kubernetes, leveraging Terraform, Datadog, and Databricks for secure, observable platforms. He combines deep protocol-level security work with practical operational experience—having built certificate managers, SSH CAs, and automated renewal systems at Yahoo. Based in Fremont, CA, he pairs a strong academic foundation (MS/BS in Computer Science) with a track record of turning cryptographic and networking research into reliable, production systems.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
University of California San DiegoBachelor's degree, Computer Science, 3.96/4.0, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, 3.96/4.0 at Wuhan University of Technology
Github Skills (25)
c-language10
ssl10
tls1210
netty10
it-security10
tls1310
java10
security-protocol10
security10
javas10
mtls10
go10
libtls10
cprogramming-language10
grpc10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
grpc/grpc-go
Jan 2020 - Mar 2022
The Go language implementation of gRPC. HTTP/2 based RPC
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:101 reviews, 30 commits, 90 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Zhen primarily focused on enhancing the advanced TLS implementation within the grpc-go repository. They introduced a new module for advanced TLS handshaking and addressed several issues related to certificate handling and revocation. Additionally, they contributed to the improvement of the test suite, adding end-to-end tests and addressing internal errors. These contributions suggest a focus on improving the security and reliability of gRPC connections.
golangnanoservicesrpcprotoprotobuf
grpc/grpc
Oct 2019 - Nov 2022
The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:253 reviews, 87 commits, 143 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Zhen focused on enhancing the security features of the gRPC project, particularly concerning ALTS (Application Layer Transport Security) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) handshaking. They implemented changes to expose ALTS context, including adding properties and utility functions to extract and use this information. The commits also involved the creation of functions and tests to check hostname and authorization, alongside refactoring code to improve the underlying TLS-related logic, demonstrating a strong emphasis on secure communication protocols.
objective-ccpppythongrpcphp
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.