Resume of Blain Smith

rebelgeek@blainsmith.com
blainsmith.com

I am a software engineer with over a decade of experience building network infrastructure, traffic management systems, and distributed platforms in Go, Rust, and C. My work spans CDN modernization, network telemetry at scale, ingress and proxy systems, and low-level packet processing with eBPF across Layer 1 through Layer 7. I thrive on performance tuning, protocol-level debugging, and designing resilient systems that move traffic reliably across global networks.

I also enjoy the challenge of powerlifting and strongman to push my body to extraordinary limits.

Skills

Linux Networking - Network Protocols - Systems Scalability - Systems Design - Software Architecture - Distributed Systems - Technical Leadership - Mentoring - Embedded Linux - Performant Caching - Unit, Integration, and Load Testing - Technical Documentation - Product Development - Developer Experience and Productivity - Online Video Delivery and Analytics - TV-Connected Devices Requirements - User Experience and User Interfaces

Languages and Tools

Go - Rust - C - eBPF - gRPC - Protocol Buffers - Envoy - Prometheus - Grafana - Terraform - Kubernetes - Docker - PostgreSQL - ScyllaDB - Redis - SQLite - DynamoDB - Riak - MongoDB - MySQL - Elixir - JavaScript - Node.js - HTML - CSS

Experience

Rushdown Studio: Staff Software Engineer

https://rushdownstudio.com
November 2025 - Present

An independent, veteran co-dev team with a proven track record of shipping world-class games for partners such as League of Legends, XBox Game Studios, Riot Games, and Amazon Games.

• Designed and built an HTTP/WebSocket reverse proxy gateway that routes game client traffic to third-party APIs, handling authentication and API key injection server-side based on target URL headers.
• Built an idempotent, transactional virtual currency ledger service using double-entry bookkeeping, designed for atomic composition within database transactions.
• Implemented domain-scoped RBAC authorization using Casbin v3 with a custom policy model backed by PostgreSQL, supporting hierarchical roles with per-resource grant/revoke and automatic inheritance.
• Integrated k-ID identity verification platform for COPPA/age-gate compliance with webhook-driven session lifecycle management.
• Mentoring and training fellow engineers in system design, documentation, technical writing, and architecture.

Limeleaf Worker Collective: Founding Member

https://limeleaf.coop
March 2024 - Present

The Limeleaf Worker Collective provides Staff+ engineering consulting and technical expertise gained from decades of experience in gaming, entertainment, and networking.

• Load balancing, performance consulting, and failover planning for client infrastructure.
• Network monitoring, firewall configuration, security architecture, and network programming.
• IoT infrastructure and security planning and development.
• Go and Rust expert building cloud platforms for various clients in gaming, climate change, and public service.
• Designing and building probes.dev with Go and SQLite, a minimalist uptime and performance monitoring platform using Go, httptrace, SQLite, and Prometheus.
• Designing and building limecast.net with Rust, Axum, Maud, and SQLite, an open source podcast hosting platform.
• Designing and building apply.coop with Go and SQLite, a job listing page for co-ops, non-profits, and PBCs.
• Designing and building henhouse.coop with Go, SQLite, and Caddy, a co-op run statis website hosting service.
• Sharing business development efforts with other members to identify and sell potential clients on Limeleaf's services.

runZero: Security Research Engineer

https://runzero.com
March 2024 - January 2025

The runZero Platform provides complete security visibility across IT, OT, IoT, cloud, mobile, and remote assets so that you can see and secure everything on your network.

• Improved network asset fingerprinting by deconstructing packets and analyzing protocol behavior across TCP, UDP, TLS, and other network characteristics.
• Expanded protocol support across IT, OT, and IoT including HTTP, TCP, UDP, ATG, ProConOS, PCWORX, MODBUS, and EtherNet/IP for comprehensive network visibility.
• Mentored engineers in Go, PostgreSQL, infrastructure, distributed systems, and networking concepts.
• Led projects for automatic content and binary update delivery to self-hosted and remote systems.
• Integrated asset data from CISA KEV, CVE.org, and other trusted vulnerability sources.
• Authored blog posts on vulnerabilities and network asset identification https://www.runzero.com/blog/rapid-response/.
• Panelist on monthly webinars covering protocol stack deep dives and security topics https://www.runzero.com/resources/webcast/.

ngrok: Staff Software Engineer

https://ngrok.com
July 2023 - February 2024

Online in One Line. ngrok is simplified, API-first ingress-as-a-service trusted by over 5M developers to get their apps online faster and keep security happy. With one line of code, developers get instant ingress to services with authentication, observability, and other critical controls. All without provisioning legacy proxies, load balancers or VPNs. ngrok’s simplicity has made it a de-facto standard tool among developers, and the world’s top brands — including GitHub, Okta, Shopify, and Twilio — recommend it throughout their documentation.

• Wrote RFC and implemented HTTP/2 support in Go for traffic from network edge to customer origin servers, improving connection performance and multiplexing across the ingress platform. https://ngrok.com/blog/http2-support
• Designed and wrote RFC for a traffic routing policy module enabling customers to programmatically define routing behavior for their ingress tunnels. https://ngrok.com/docs/traffic-policy
• Implemented a global rate limiter supporting sliding window, leaky bucket, and token bucket policies for customer-defined traffic shaping.
• Built an nftables rule builder in Go for programmatic firewall rule management in ngrok's open source firewall toolkit https://github.com/ngrok/firewall_toolkit.
• Mentored and trained fellow engineers in Go, Rust, and eBPF through weekly office hours and regular code reviews.
• Collaborated with C-suite and product team on feature planning and technical direction.

Rocket Science: Staff Engineer

https://rocketscience.gg
September 2022 - July 2023

With decades of industry leadership experience, Rocket Science creates online tools & services for the world's most successful games. We designs solutions to solve a wide array of problems for both Publishers & Studios and have experience working with first and third-party partners in regions around the world.

• Built a game client networking SDK in Rust communicating with a Go server over QUIC, working closely with game engine developers on protocol design and reliability.
• Built microservices in Rust and ScyllaDB for high-throughput, low-latency game backend systems.
• Mentored and trained engineers across the organization in system design, architecture, documentation, and coding practices.
• Interfaced with multiple engineering teams to raise standards, troubleshoot issues, and provide technical leadership on customer projects.
• Worked with recruiting to identify and interview engineering candidates.

StackPath: Senior Software Engineer

https://stackpath.com
June 2022 - September 2022

StackPath is a cloud computing and services provider that puts its locations in densely populated markets. We have dozens of locations that each sit well inside their city limits, rather than a handful of zones that actually sit somewhere out of town.

That way your applications, data, and content—in part or in whole—can be closer to end-users and devices, and will have a fast, secure, and seamless experience.

• Led CDN modernization effort adopting Envoy, Prometheus, and other CNCF solutions for traffic management and observability.
• Designed server load and health scoring rules for CDN load balancing, including "hot file" detection to optimize cache distribution.
• Built the gRPC and HTTP Gateway control plane admin API with automatic OpenAPI docs and Backstage integration.
• Primary Go code reviewer across the CDN team; created and maintained Go coding standards documentation.
• Drove architectural documentation of the entire CDN product using C4 model.
• Evaluated engineering candidates through coding challenge reviews for CDN team roles.

Subspace: Senior Software Engineer

https://subspace.com
December 2021 - May 2022

Subspace is a global network platform that allows real-time applications to route traffic on the fastest paths. All at an IP level, and all at scale, putting developers in complete control.

Backed by top Silicon Valley VCs, Subspace builds deep tech in global networking (Layer0 (DWDM) to Layer7). Run by top former Execs from Riot Games, SpaceX, Google, Facebook, and leading Telecom companies. The biggest multiplayer games in the world use Subspace to create the most competitive and engaging online experience possible.

• Built and maintained the core network telemetry system measuring latency, jitter, and packet loss across a 125-PoP global network using Go and eBPF.
• Implemented IPv4/IPv6 packet processing at Layer 1 and Layer 2 with TCP and UDP using eBPF programs for high-performance traffic measurement.
• Leveraged Linux kernel features including hardware timestamping at the NIC and eBPF rules to direct packets to specific destinations with minimal overhead.
• Translated BGP route quality signals from telemetry data into BPF maps to inform packet switching decisions across the network.
• Performance-tuned telemetry systems to minimize CPU overhead, ensuring forwarding capacity remained dedicated to customer traffic.
• Telemetry data drove traffic optimization for WebRTC-CDN, Packet Accelerators, and SIPTeleport products to ensure real-time traffic was optimally routed.
• Led quarterly cross-functional Delivery Teams coordinating with product and leadership to plan and execute network infrastructure goals.
• Authored ADRs and presented Design Reviews for system improvements with rollout plans to mitigate disruption to dependent systems.
• Co-authored fast_afpacket, a high-performance AF_PACKET library used in the telemetry system for link performance measurement.

Wolfjaw Studios: Principal Software Engineer, Partner

https://wolfjawstudios.com
August 2019 - December 2021

Wolfjaw crafts compelling experiences through our expertise in building game services, player engagement tools, and companion services. Wolfjaw also makes it easy to curate your video content and drive viewership by equipping your team with a custom suite of streaming solutions, applications, and analytics tools. We are hired as consultants by some of the most popular video game and entertainment companies in the world.

• Built low-level TCP/UDP packet routing services in Go for multiplayer game traffic, with load testing, benchmarking, and performance tuning.
• Designed server allocation, scaling, and custom matchmaking systems handling real-time game traffic across distributed infrastructure.
• Served as solutions architect and individual contributor on primary projects while providing technical leadership on secondary projects to develop other engineers into tech leads.
• Created internal educational services in Go covering packet routing, telemetry, matchmaking, leaderboards, and authentication patterns.
• Game client/server integration in C, C++, and C# for connecting to external backend services.
• Bootstrapped project infrastructure including CI/CD pipelines, tooling, and security guidelines.

Kinetic: Senior Software Engineer

http://wearkinetic.com
December 2017 - August 2019

Kinetic is attempting to change the way people think about safety by equipping factory and warehouse workers with AI-enabled kinematic trackers to analyze and eventually predict work-related injuries.

• Designed and implemented, in Go, the deployment of device management infrastructure with Amazon IoT and our custom Go APIs to sync device state changes, transmit sensor data securely, and issue software patches remotely.
• Worked closely with data scientists to design and implement, in Go and C, their trained models onto devices for inferring kinematic movement. Wrote a custom clone of Tensorflow so it worked on our low power, battery operated, wifi-disabled devices during work hours.
• Redesigned and reimplemented our REST API, in Go, to be more performant, reliable, and resilient. This also included best practices for metrics monitoring with InfluxDB for latencies, response times as well as CPU, memory, and I/O.
• Co-authored our custom Math Engine that performed computations of the aggregated sensor data to be made available to customers through a dashboard. We implemented our custom computations with a DAG to ensure deterministic results based on user input.
• Mentored junior engineers and trained them in Go, AWS, Rust, and C. Also helped them level up their skills in general software engineer best practices like unit testing, integration testing, software design, requirements gathering, RFC writing, etc.

Odd Networks: CTO, Senior Software Engineer

March 2015 - December 2017

Odd Networks was born out of MadGlory to build cross platform video and subscription management platforms for gaming, mobile, and tv connected devices. Our platform supports all major online video providers (OVP), Brightcove, Ooyala, JWPlayer, and Vimeo and our SDKs are used to build apps for Roku, Amazon FireTV, AppleTV/iOS, and AndroidTV/mobile.

• Designed and implemented the primary video content metadata API mimicking a high performance read cache that services devices and sits in front of the OVPs as its upstream sources.
• Designed a plugin interface system for the content API to allow for writing data providers from any upstream source that provide video and playlist data.
• Worked with other app developers to design the app SDK for Roku, Apple, Amazon, and Android apps each in their native languages.
• Built and maintained the first live poker video app for XBox 360 in C#.
• Built and maintained the web widget in Vue.js to allow customers to render their catalog on any website they own by embedding a script tag with an API key. The output of this app looks similar to the Netflix web app.
• Built and co-maintain the AndroidTV and FireTV app from a single Java codebase with different build targets.
• Implemented a VAST 3.0 Java plugin for all Java-based apps to support video ads.
• Built a command line tool in Go to automate the build of any app platform by checking out the source from GitHub and merging in image assets and color settings to create a branded app for new customers.
• Built internal tooling in Go for aiding other engineers to locate and deploy test Roku apps on the local network, generate and validate API tokens for testing and development, an HLS stream validator and testing for ensuring stream quality.
• Built an events tracking system in Go for apps to send back usage data for app launches, browsing app catalogs, playing/stopping/pausing videos for generating usage graphs for customers. It also has the capability to write copies of the event data to any datastore like S3 or PostgreSQL.
• Built a feed generation service in Go to supply Roku, Amazon, and Google XML feeds so they may index customer’s content for their global search every hour.
• Co-designed and built a cross platform in-app-purchases (IAP) system in Elixir for synchronizing purchases from one platform (ex. Apple) to another (ex. Roku). This system can be used for any digital content from one-time purchases to recurring subscriptions. Supports transactions from Roku, Apple, Google, and Amazon billing systems.
• Set up all the testing, building, and deployment pipelines of all backend services using Docker and CircleCI with hosting on Heroku.

MadGlory (now PUBG New York): Senior Software Engineer

https://madglory.com
https://pubg.com
October 2012 - March 2015

Founded in 2012 by a team of engineers whose passion is in game services, MadGlory is a team of gamers, developers and designers who now work on their favorite games. First cutting their teeth at Agora Games, now Warner Brothers Games NY, and Major League Gaming, the team has been building game services for AAA studios and developers for almost 20 years.

Most of the roles below involved augmenting internal developer teams to help them launch their projects for their respective studios.

• Riot Games: Worked on a tournament engine in Java and Riak and accompanying front end app in Backbone.js for displaying tournament progress with progress charts, scorecards, and team standings.
• Riot Games: Worked on the League of Legends game client in ActionScript to build features for player profiles to display game wins/losses, favorite champion, play style, and other relevant statistics.
• Warner Brothers: Website and data migration for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online in Drupal.
• Warner Brothers: Website for Shadow of Mordor game in WordPress. EA Games Mobile Division: Built a digital asset code redemption system in Node.js with Redis and PostgreSQL for allowing players to redeem one-time codes for in-game items such as coins, skins, and more.
• Overdog: Co-built an online game-agnostic matchmaking system for XBox One based on player interests such as movies and music instead of experience level using Win.js, Node.js, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
• Worked with configuring and managing AWS and GCP resources for most of the projects above along with setting up the testing and build pipeline when needed.

Other customers I can mention by name, but not project due to NDA restrictions, are Bethesda, Epic Games, Kabam, Super Evil Mega Corp., and BossKey.

Harvard School of Public Health IT Dept: Senior Programmer

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu
August 2005 - October 2012

I spent most of my career as a programmer at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in their IT department with only 1 other programmer. Each graduate school at Harvard has their own IT department with dedicated staff. I was on the IT Web Team in charge of everything web technology related.

During the first homepage redesign, we built a custom CMS to suit the needs of the content publishers in the school and worked closely with the marketing department to accomplish this. I also created the school’s first online course evaluation system that integrated with the registrar’s system. This system not only allowed students to evaluate their courses and professors, but it also allowed those professors to run reports to see aggregated results and read feedback from student comments.

Another large school-wide initiative was the HSPH Forum (https://theforum.sph.harvard.edu) which involved building a live video broadcasting studio and managing those live events through a website we built on WordPress. I became proficient in streaming video over the web during this project since we needed to target as many devices as possible. This initiative generated many viewers because their aim was to be a cornerstone for news and information in the field of public health.

Other smaller tasks I was responsible for was supporting the core departments of the school with any web-related jobs. These jobs put me front and center with tenured professors, high ranking administrators such as Deans and Directors of their departments. Gathering requirements, asking questions, and helping them achieve their project goals was priority #1. I made a good name for myself amongst those people and they grew to trust me which, according to my boss, “was hard to do because of their high expectations and the status they carry within Harvard”.

interlinkONE: Programmer

https://interlinkone.com
June 1998 - August 2002

interlinkONE was my first programming job while I was still in high school. I went to a technical high school which offered an IT program and they offered an internship program that I took advantage of.

During my time there I wrote web reporting software in ASP 3.0 that pulled from SQL Server databases for mutual funds clients. Later I spent time working on their product offering for an integration sales and marketing solution for lead generation, lead tracking, order management and fulfillment. I also worked on a custom build GitHub-like software tracking system so we could manage versions and releases of our product and testing with our internal QA team. We called them SMTs (Software Modification Tickets).

Education

I spent a lot of time in school transferring and attending classes trying to complete my B.S. degree in Computer Science. Due to changing degree requirements, time commitments and responsibilities, I decided to focus on my career, and that decision has paid off. Having the opportunity to be employed by companies/institutions who believed in me, my skills, drive and dedication to succeed, I was able to achieve the goals listed above.

Georgia Tech: M.S. Computer Science

https://omscs.gatech.edu/specialization-computing-systems
August 2022 - Fall 2025

SUNY Empire State College: B.S. Computer Science (Graduated)

https://esc.edu
August 2012 - June 2020

Harvard University: B.S. Computer Science

https://harvard.edu
August 2005 - June 2010

Bentley University: B.S. Computer Science

https://www.bentley.edu
August 2003 - June 2005

Worcester Polytechnic Institute: B.S. Computer Science

https://www.wpi.edu
August 2001 - June 2003

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: B.S. Computer Science

https://rpi.edu
August 2000 - June 2001

Side Projects

• Core contributor for Hare and maintainer of various modules
• Author of hare-packet — network packet encoding/decoding library for Hare
• Author of hare-bpf — BPF kernel interface and instruction builders for Hare
• Co-author of fast_afpacket — raw socket networking with AF_PACKET and SO_TIMESTAMPING
• Co-author of firewall_toolkit — nftables expressions, rules, and BPF filter management
• Author of pprof.sh — Go benchmark testing aid

Hobbies & Interests

• My smart and funny autistic son who reminds me so much of myself
• Competitive powerlifing and strongman
• Motorcycle riding, modding, and maintenance
• Car racing, modding, and maintenance
• Off-roading, overlanding, and camping
• Heavy metal, 90's hip-hip, and synthwave
• Horror, action, and psychological thriller movies
• Reading fantasy and technical books and academic papers