Zi Lin
Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZi Lin is a software engineer in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building secure, production-grade systems at Google, Cloudflare, and AWS, grounded in a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He specializes in TLS, PKI, and identity/access tooling—contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Cloudflare's cfssl and redoctober show hands-on expertise in cryptographic tooling, keystore handling, and secure client/server flows. His background blends applied crypto research (private proximity testing, anonymous blacklisting) with practical engineering—shipping CLI clients, HTTPS integrations, and unit-tested features. Pragmatic and curious, he describes himself playfully as an "ambitious Turing machine," signaling both strong technical rigor and a taste for intellectual experiments.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor, Computer Science, Bachelor, Computer Science at Zhejiang UniversityUniversity of Minnesota Twin CitiesExchange student, Computer Science, Exchange student, Computer Science at Simon Fraser University
Github Skills (20)
api-rest10
tls1210
api-design10
restful-api10
testing10
tls1310
mtls10
go10
pki10
libtls10
rest-api10
encryption10
json9
http9
certificate-authority9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
cloudflare/cfssl
Jul 2014 - Aug 2017
CFSSL: Cloudflare's PKI and TLS toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:219 commits, 225 PRs, 282 pushes in 3 years
Contributions summary:Zi contributed to the `cfssl` repository, a Cloudflare PKI and TLS toolkit, by implementing features related to keystore loading, Chrome SHA1 deprecation, and ECDSA ubiquity warnings. They added functionality to load keystore files using relative paths and incorporated logic for deprecating SHA1 algorithms. Moreover, the user added unit tests to validate the new features.
cfsslcloudflarepki
cloudflare/redoctober
Apr 2015 - Feb 2017
Go server for two-man rule style file encryption and decryption.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 27 PRs, 30 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Zi primarily focused on developing and enhancing the back-end functionality of the RedOctober project, a Go server for file encryption/decryption. They implemented a client package to interact with the server, including request/response handling and secure communication via HTTPS. Their contributions included adding a CLI client and implementing a re-encrypt operation, along with addressing various bug fixes and feature enhancements. The user also made changes to error handling and introduced base64 decoding for file processing within the command-line interface.
decryptionfile-encryptiongo-server
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