Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Leonardo da Vinci

I work on a variety of performance engineering, research and development, and analytics roles at Jump Trading, in Sydney, Australia, including measurement and optimisation of trading, software, firmware, kernel, embedded, FPGA, and hardware devices, networks, and systems. All details are covered by an NDA.

I sit on the board of the OI Society as a director and vice president. I bring my experience running small charitable organisations to its governance and growth. I have OI myself, so this work is personally rewarding.

As part of my role at Jump Trading, I served on the board of the seL4 Foundation, in Sydney, Australia. I brought my experience running small businesses and charities to its governance and stewardship. I have deep ties to seL4, having literally written the book on it during my time on the original NICTA seL4 team, so the role was very fulfilling for me.

Following Cisco's acquisition of Exablaze, I became a Principal Engineer in Cisco's Intent Based Networking Group, in Sydney, Australia, continuing to lead development in ultra-low-latency systems for the high-frequency trading sector. I worked most closely with the Product Management team on new switch products, including the Nexus 3550 switch family, the SmartNIC and SmartNIC+ adapters, and the FDK firmware toolkit, alongside the libexanic and exasock, and Exact-Capture software. I also worked with the support delivery team (TAC) to train and deliver support across the existing product range, and with Sales, PR, Marketing, and the documentation and website teams. I led and mentored junior staff, growing their software and hardware engineering skills. I hold patented innovations in time synchronisation, including a patent on network time synchronisation.

I took on many of the functions of a small-business CTO, becoming the public face of Exablaze and a core part of its strategic management, sales, and marketing teams, while staying hands-on in engineering. I routinely visited clients, mostly trading firms in Chicago, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Paris, to understand their networking and trading problems, then worked with our engineering team to architect solutions using existing Exablaze products, or invent new ones. The ExaLINK Hydra, the ExaNIC V9P network interface card, and the ExaDisk are products I was directly responsible for. I regularly presented at STAC Summits worldwide, on topics including interconnect standards, PTP, how to accurately measure nanosecond-scale networks, and what a MAC actually is and how to measure it. In my own time, I designed, built, and maintained Exact-Capture, a high-rate, high-precision network capture tool, open source on GitHub.

Acquired by Cisco in 2020.

I designed, built, and debugged some of the fastest networking hardware and software in the industry, including the ExaNIC software stack. I presented Picosecond Scale Measurements for Nanosecond Scale Trading at the STAC Summit, and recorded a four-part series on precision network measurement: Quantifying Capture Precision and Accuracy, Introducing High Precision Timestamping, How NOT to Measure Nanosecond Scale Networks, and A Methodology for Picosecond Scale Measurement of Nanosecond Scale Networks.

Acquired by Cisco in 2020.

I worked as a researcher on SSICLOPS (Scalable and Secure Infrastructures for Cloud Operations), an EU Horizon 2020 project on managing federated private cloud infrastructure. SSICLOPS focused on cloud networking techniques within software-defined data centres. I continued my research on high-performance networking and measurement in this setting, published as Where Has My Time Gone?.

The Cambridge Computer Laboratory is now known as the Department of Computer Science and Technology Systems Research Group.

I worked in a team of six researchers advancing the state of the art in data centre networks, developing a new approach to software-defined networking that applied end-host state to significantly expand SDN capabilities. I helped select the core technologies for our experimental platform, and developed firmware, software, and drivers for the Netronome NFP-3200, a 40-core, 240-thread 10G network processor. This work led to a SIGCOMM 2015 publication.

I worked under Turing Award winner and Ethernet co-inventor Chuck Thacker on AutoNet 3 (AN3), a circuit-switched network for data centres. I measured and benchmarked the existing Windows network stack, developed a simulation and prototyping environment for the AN3 sockets interface, and built the first AN3 network adapter device driver, complicated by incomplete FPGA firmware and incomplete documentation, typical for a hardware project at this early a stage.

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley closed in 2014.

Exablaze grew out of work performed at Zomojo between 2008 and 2012. In late 2011, Exablaze span out from Zomojo to operate as its own entity, and I transitioned across to take on this role, alongside my PhD at the University of Cambridge. I performed technical consulting, engineering, marketing, and sales work for the company, mostly across the US and EU.

Acquired by Cisco in 2020.

My research improved data centre resilience, robustness, and resource efficiency. I worked on networking architectures spanning switching, routing, simulation, and statistical modelling, down to I/O architecture, network interface controller design, and driver implementation. This included FPGA experimentation in VHDL and Verilog on the NetFPGA 10G platform, and device driver development for the Linux 2.6 and 3.2 kernels. The PhD place was fully department funded, backed by DARPA (MRC2) and EPSRC (INTERNET) grants, through the Cambridge Computer Laboratory's Systems Research Group in Networks and Operating Systems.

I won the British Computer Society's Brendan Murphy Memorial Young Researcher Prize at MSN'12 for best young researcher presentation, and won the silver medal at the ACM Student Research Competition at both SIGCOMM 2012 and SIGCOMM 2013. I was elected the Systems Research Group's representative to the Graduate Student Forum in 2012 and re-elected in 2013, and elected a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 2012. My NSDI 2015 paper won the Best Paper Award, and I gave an invited "Best of the Rest" presentation on it at USENIX ATC'15.

Supervised by Prof Andrew Moore and Prof Robert Watson.

The Cambridge Computer Laboratory is now known as the Department of Computer Science and Technology Systems Research Group.

Clare Hall was my college at Cambridge, the small graduate community I actually belonged to alongside my PhD in the Computer Laboratory. I served on the Graduate Student Body (GSB) committee, elected President in July 2012 and elected Secretary in October 2013, representing student interests to the College. I worked with the College's IT committee to move Clare Hall to centrally managed Wi-Fi, improving connectivity for residents and Fellows.

I was also co-opted Secretary of the University of Cambridge Graduate Union in June 2014, then elected to the same role that September, representing graduate students' interests at the university level.

I worked on systems research and development at Zomojo, a small proprietary trading firm, mostly focused on latency arbitrage in South East Asia. I designed and built low-latency, real-time network hardware and software, with a particular focus on the hardware and software interface. The work was largely self-directed, with an intense emphasis on rapid development and deployment. All details are covered by an NDA.

Zomojo's networking work spun out to become Exablaze, later acquired by Cisco in 2020.

I designed and implemented Aurora, a capability abstraction and management library for the Secure Embedded L4 (seL4) operating system. I was also the primary author of the seL4 User Manual.

Merged into CSIRO's Data61 in 2015. In 2021, Data61 dissolved the Trustworthy Systems group that had grown out of the original NICTA seL4 team, as part of a strategic pivot toward AI. The team dispersed to UNSW Sydney and a handful of new companies, and seL4's development now continues under the independent seL4 Foundation, established the year before as a neutral home for the project.

I wrote C#.NET code for an advanced scenario-based simulation product (Avalanche ST) and a crowd modelling and simulation product (Crowd Flow).

New College was my residential college at UNSW.

• 2008 — Highest Achieving Student prize for Mechatronic Engineering
• 2007 — Elected Head of Technical Operations, New College Revue
• 2007 — Employed as Head of the College's Networking and Resources Committee ("HoNARC")

I taught a range of UNSW School of Mechanical Engineering courses, including CAD drafting, engineering experimentation, C/C++ programming, and industrial robotics. I received special dispensation to design and teach the laboratory component of MTRN4221 Industrial Robotics, and continued to administer it as senior tutor, guiding students through the construction of an industrial robotic system combining sensor input, actuation, and camera-based visual feedback.

DBT Australia (Deutsche Bergbau-Technik) was a major supplier of underground coal mining equipment. I worked in the Mechanical Engineering office of the Longwall group, performing electronic design, testing, and mechatronic CAD drafting. I wrote a domain-specific language for drawing archive management, and I designed, built, and tested a simulation product for longwall control system testing. I also carried out mechanical and mechatronic CAD drafting and design in ProEngineer and AutoCAD, for new and existing longwall, shearer, and shield products.

Acquired by Bucyrus in 2007; Bucyrus was itself later acquired by Caterpillar in 2011.

My mechatronic engineering thesis, "Embedded Domain Specific Languages for String Based Data Manipulation," was awarded 90%, earning me early entry into the masters by research program (MEng Manufacturing and Management). I also received a High Distinction in MTRN9222 (Artificially Intelligent Machines), covering state estimation and stochastic processes, sensor data fusion, optimisation algorithms, and machine learning techniques including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.

• 2011 — First Class Honours in Mechatronic Engineering
• 2010 — Bachelor of Computer Science (High Distinction) and Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering (Distinction)
• 2009 — Faculty of Engineering / National ICT Australia Engineering Research Summer Scholarship, Embedded and Real-Time Operating Systems (ERTOS) group
• 2008 — Elected student representative, Engineering Faculty Board
• 2003 — The only UNSW Cooperative Scholarship in Mechanical/Mechatronic Engineering offered that year

New College was my residential college at UNSW during the early years of my undergraduate degree. I later returned as Student IT Support Officer.

I spent the first two terms of Year 11 at Carmel School, in Perth, Western Australia, before returning to Perth Modern School to complete my High School Certificate.

I completed my High School Certificate at Perth Modern School on a Music Specialty Scholarship for trombone.