Kenton Varda
Principal Engineer at Cloudflare, Inc.
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
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RockstarKenton Varda is a Principal Engineer with 15 years of experience who blends hands-on systems engineering with product and platform leadership. At Cloudflare he effectively acts as a CTO for the Workers initiative, having designed and implemented a V8-based JavaScript/Wasm runtime from scratch and launched a serverless edge platform that now handles millions of requests per second. He’s the lead developer of Cap'n Proto (a successor to Protocol Buffers) and previously led Protocol Buffers work at Google, with his serialization/RPC work running in production at gigabit scale. As co-founder of Sandstorm he pioneered fine-grained containerization to improve security and usability for web apps, and he continues to contribute to key open-source projects like workerd and pycapnp. Based in Austin, he remains deeply technical—reviewing designs, hiring engineers, and still writing core runtime code while steering a long-term vision to present the Cloudflare network as one unified machine for developers.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
71reputation
33kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (38)
c-language10
runtimes10
pytest10
python10
testing10
run-time10
proto10
runtime-compilation10
rpc10
exception-handling10
performance-optimization10
cython10
capn-proto10
runtime-environment10
concurrency10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
capnproto/capnproto
Feb 2013 - Jan 2023
Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1098 reviews, 3575 commits, 1299 PRs in 10 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Kenton focused on enhancing the functionality of the Cap'n Proto RPC system, primarily improving its robustness and performance. Contributions included fixing bugs in handling of WebSocket streams, addressing a performance issue by optimizing the handling of memory allocations, and enhancing exception handling in several RPC-related components. The work also involved changes to the internal structure of the code to improve performance and make it more resilient against race conditions.
rpccppprotobufc-libraryproto
cloudflare/workerd
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
The JavaScript / Wasm runtime that powers Cloudflare Workers
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1355 reviews, 134 commits, 296 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Kenton contributed significantly to the workerd project, primarily focusing on the implementation and maintenance of the core JavaScript and WebAssembly runtime. Their work involved importing and integrating workerd code, indicating a role in maintaining and developing the runtime's internal functionality. They addressed build compatibility issues by making the code work on Clang 11/libc++ 11 and adding experimental features. The code changes spanned across various parts of the project, from API design to core system functionalities.
cloudflarejavascriptpowersruntimeservice-worker
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