Sam Johnson
Maryland, USA
GITHUB CONTRIBUTIONS
CONSULTING CLIENTS / DUROSOFT LLC
2022 – Present
- Designed Orca's new chain-indexing infrastructure
- Broke 1M TPS backfilling Solana transactions into Geyser for [stealth mode] client
- Optimized the Rust behind ZisK's opcode system, helping make it the fastest zkVM in the industry
- Designed multi-wallet obfuscation/mixing tech for a major Solana web terminal
- Built onchain 2FA for Solana wallets for [stealth mode]
EDUCATION
Brown University
2017 | Master of Science in Computer Science
Dickinson College
2014 | Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
TECH SKILLS
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Rust (9 years)
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AI / Neural Networks (6 years)
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ClickHouse (2 years)
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Solana (3 years)
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Polkadot (4 years)
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Crystal (7 years)
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Ruby (10 years)
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JavaScript (15 years)
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HTML/CSS (15 years)
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PostgreSQL (10 years)
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AWS (10 years)
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GCP (10 years)
INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE
Parity Technologies
Rust Core Runtime Engineer | 2022 - 2023
Polkadot / Rust-based L1 Blockchain Ecosystem - Rust
Worked directly with Gavin Wood (original Ethereum CTO) on the Polkadot blockchain ecosystem as a core member of the FRAME team
Authored "benchmarking v2" syntax, the pallet tasks API, and numerous other additions to FRAME
(YC 'S20)
CTO | 2020 - 2022
Corporate Learning Platform - Rust / Ruby on Jets
Led ground-up rebuild of core platform and obtained SOC-2 Type II within first 12 months
Scaled up processes and systems to handle exponential growth and web-scale messaging traffic
Hired and managed a team of 11+ engineers
Guided Arist through seed round and a $24m combo Series A+B round led by Peakspan Capital
Platform is now used at 20% of the Fortune 500
Kagi Search
Founding Engineer | 2019 - 2020
Privacy-Oriented Search Engine - Rust / Crystal
Hired and managed a team of 6 software engineers
Architected web-scale, global, low-latency search infrastructure
Developed distributed approach to scrape Bing and Google Search with low latency, at scale, undetected
BlockVue
CTO | 2017 - 2019
Commercial Real Estate Virtual Tour Platform - Rust / Ruby on Rails
Managed and mentored a team of 5 engineers across three web and one mobile product
Designed serverless Rails app and frontend that drives 360 degree CRE virtual tour platform
Leveraged artificial neural networks to automatically generate and furnish 3D scenes from floorplans
Wealthbox
Software Engineer | 2015 - 2017
CRM for Financial Advisors - Ruby on Rails / C++
Brought backend into compliance with SEC 17a-4
Developed high-speed C++ database anonymizer
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport (NUWC)
Scientist | SMART Scholarship Recipient | 2017 – 2020
Deep Learning, C/C++, Python, Rust, Cafe, R-CNN
deep learning • computer vision • machine learning • automated target recognition • algorithms development
Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Research Enterprise Intership Program (NREIP)
NREIP Recipient | Researcher | 2014-2015
Deep Learning, C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, SciRuby
Founded and led RAPTOR, a computer-vision pipeline that recovers the 3D position and orientation of known objects from a single 2D image by training neural networks entirely on ray-traced renderings of their 3D models
Pioneered a synthetic-data approach — generating unlimited training images from CAD models at randomized poses — that predated the field's mainstream adoption of render-based training and domain randomization
Assisted AI research team in dissecting Pedro Domingos' infamous Sum Product Networks paper
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
DHS HS-STEM Recipient | Summer 2013
Rose Compiler Framework, C/C++, Java
Worked with ROSE compiler team to add static analysis code security "checkers" to Compass
Devised a novel technique for efficient memory leak detection in C/C++ code
Received medal for placing in top 10% at the LLNL 2013 Summer Research Symposium
OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS
Foundational Rust crate for importing the tokens of foreign items when writing proc macros — used within FRAME in the Polkadot SDK to power #[derive_impl] and pallet macros
Solana realtime indexing, research, and backfilling framework hosted at Anza (the core Solana org) — covers every epoch of mainnet history at 3.2M TPS (primary maintainer)
Rust crate that allows developers to dynamically embed code samples from elsewhere in a Rust project directly within doc comments and markdown files
Rust crate for printing clean, non-warning status messages from within Cargo build scripts
Rust crate providing safe, generic monetary types for all ISO currencies and common cryptocurrencies
PUBLICATIONS
- Johnson, Samuel, "Fast Type-based Indexing and Querying of Dynamic Hierarchical Data" (2017). Brown University Computer Science Master's Theses. https://cs.brown.edu/research/pubs/theses/masters/2017/kelly.samuel.pdf
- Kelly, Samuel, Jeff Byers, and David W Aha, "RAPTOR Technical Report" (2014). AIC-15-031. Archived at the Wayback Machine (PDF)
- Kelly, Samuel, "AST Indexing: A Near-Constant Time Solution to the Get-Descendants-by-Type Problem" (2014). Dickinson College Honors Theses. Paper 147. https://dickinson.hykucommons.org/concern/etds/97a2026c-684f-4fbc-82eb-6241931a1897